Economic Consequences enjoyed an outright favourable reception in Turkey. This chapter illuminates the circumstances that made this possible. Of the Carthaginian peace-imposing treaties of the Paris Conference (1919), only the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) concerning the Ottoman Empire was annulled after a battleground victory (1922), and replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). An officer and a diplomat, Ali Fethi (Okyar), soon to become prime minister of Turkey, was a prisoner of war in Malta when he heard of Keynes’s book, acquired a copy, and translated it in 1920. Because the national leaders were anxious to know what awaited them in the peace talks, given the huge Ottoman debt they inherited, impending war reparations, and the discriminatory treatment they suspected, upon Ali Fethi’s release and return, the translation was published in 1922 by the official press in Ankara. It helped prepare the Turkish delegation to the Lausanne conference. This case provides us with an early example of Economic Consequences as a policy instrument in favour of a new international integration serviceable to peace and reconstruction in the face of an international conflict.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace was first published in 1919 and, since then, changed the economic discourse surrounding reparations and Carthaginian peace. This chapter specifies how three elements hinted at in the introduction of the Economic Consequences of the Peace – social classes, national sovereignty, and the international political system – can explain Keynes’ assessment of Carthaginian peace. The chapter analyses the optimality of reparations in the context of these three elements.