After a brief introduction to the outbreak of the Austrian Credit Anstalt crisis in May 1931 and the early response by central bankers from Bank of England, the BIS and the New York Federal Reserve Bank, this chapter proceeds to present the book’s overall issues and main concepts, which will be used as a heuristic framework throughout the narrative. The main concepts of the book are radical uncertainty, sensemaking, narrative emplotment, imagined futures and epistemic communities. In the chapter, I discuss how these concepts are helpful in understanding central bankers’, and other actors’, decision-making and practices in the five month from May through September. The chapter also discusses my analytical strategy and presents the empirical material, which comes from the Bank of England, Bank for International Settlements, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the J.P. Morgan Archive, the Rothschild Archive and a few others. At the end of the chapter, I present the structure of the book.

Keynes began actively trading in currencies almost as soon as he had published The Economic Consequences. Despite the advantages of being the leading economic thinker of his generation and possessing an enviable network of contacts with policymakers, his speculation met with mixed results. This chapter examines two issues: first, the influence which Keynes’ understanding of the post-war international economic and political situation had on his foreign exchange speculation strategy; and, second, the influence his experience as a speculator had on his political-economic theory in the years following the publication of his book.

This chapter is an overview of central banking developments between 1919 and 1939, highlighting the establishment and operation of 28 new central banks, most in what are now called emerging markets and developing countries. Inspired by expert advice and underpinned by foreign lending, the new banks were designed to function independently from political interference, and to defend the gold standard as part an international, rules-based network of cooperating institutions. The Great Depression revealed the flaws in this setup. As capital flows dried up and international cooperation faltered, the gold standard disintegrated, and central banks were unable to head off macroeconomic and financial collapse. Designed to fight inflation, they were ill-prepared to address financial fragility. In the wake of their failure, a two-pronged reaction set in. Central bank autonomy was curtailed, while monetary policy was subordinated to new policy objectives, including the support of import substitution in Latin America and central planning in Eastern Europe. At the same time, central banks’ powers expanded, as they were transformed into agents of state-led development policy. Thus, the new central banks of the 1920s and 1930s were integrally involved not just in post-First World War reconstruction and the Great Depression, but also in the key economic developments of the mid-20th century.

This chapter asks how a new generation of central banks in the interwar period changed their function, away from state financing and financial stability provision, and toward stabilizing prices and avoiding fiscal and financial dominance. The new concept of a central bank as an institutional constraint, imposed from the outside, and movement from a “can do” to a “can’t do” institution, ultimately ended in failure. It made for bad policy and poor outcomes, specifically contributing failure to stem contagion in the 1931 financial crisis. After 1945 a new reinvention of central banking involved the elaboration of a social consensus that bought back ele-ments of the “can do” environment.

Established at the behest of the League of Nations to help the country secure an new international loan, the Bank of Greece was regarded with a mixture of suspicion and hostility from its very foundation. The onset of the Great Depression tested its commitment to defending the exchange rate against domestic pressure to reflate the economy. Its policy response has been criticized as being ineffectual and even detrimental: the bank is said to have been unduly orthodox and restrictive, not only during but also after the country’s eventual exit from the gold exchange standard. This chapter combines qualitative and quantitative sources to revisit the Bank of Greece’s decisions during the Great Depression. It argues that monetary policy was neither as ineffective nor as restrictive as its critics suggest, thanks to a continued trickle of foreign lending but also to the Bank’s own decision to sterilize foreign exchange outflows. It reappraises Greece’s attempt to maintain the gold standard after sterling’s devaluation, a decision routinely denounced as a policy mistake. Finally, it challenges the notion that Greece constitutes an exception to the rule that countries that shed their ‘golden fetters’ faster recovered earlier.

To date, research on Latin American central banks in the interwar years has focused on their loss of autonomy due to the slump and subsequent implementation of innovative, countercyclical monetary policies. These policies, although fostering economic recovery, led to higher rates of inflation and exchange-rate volatility. The chapter shows that these policies resulted from more than loss of autonomy and subordination of central banks to governments. In fact, the need for countercyclical monetary policies had been foreseen by foreign advisors to newly established central bank before and during the crisis, but Latin American central bankers had been reluctant to implement them for fear of damaging the credibility of the gold-standard regime. This finally changed with the collapse of the gold exchange standard. In the 1930s, central banks had become effective actors, channeling credit to the real economy and supporting the emergence of state institutions that would promote the development of local industry.

In the 1920s, the Bank of England promoted central banking to preserve London’s control over Indian financial policies and insulate those policies from political changes sweeping the colony. This chapter traces India’s deepening distrust of London in the monetary sphere, and the role envisaged by the Bank of England for an Indian central bank operating under its tutelage. After the failure of efforts to create a central bank in the 1920s, the Bank of England and Whitehall insisted on a privately owned, ‘independent’ central bank as a precondition for Indian constitutional reform. In the end, notions of an independent central bank did not stand up to the vicissitudes of colonial bureaucratic politics. Efforts of the colonial government and the Bank of England to curb the independence of the Reserve Bank of India offer important insights into the early history of central banking in India, but also shed new light on the role central banks in economies undergoing the transition from colonialism to independence.

The EU’s actions show how the exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction by one actor (the EU) based on local approaches to human rights standards and specific values (privacy and the protection of personal data) could lead to the convergence of values and laws on the global stage. Likely directions are decreasing territorialism or broad interpretations of ‘territory’, increasing elevation of fundamental rights to the disadvantage of certain competing interests, and the EU acting to set a high global data protection norm, enabled by the fundamental right to data protection conditioning its exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction. Convergence could be resisted. If, however, the EU’s reach were strong enough to avoid or counter resistance, this would ultimately lead to fewer conflicts in jurisdiction as global standards would converge and, even in the EU–US data privacy law interface, commonalities and shared approaches to rights protection would emerge.

Chapter 3. The mechanisms that govern how a gold standard works, and the historical performance of gold standards in practice, have often been misunderstood or inaccurately described – both by critics and by supporters, including academic economists. We address the main misconceptions by critics, including “The Gold Standard caused the Great Depression,” “A gold standard is dangerously deflationary,” “The volatility of the price of gold in recent years shows that gold would be an unstable monetary standard.” We also address the main misconceptions by supporters, including “Gold has objective value,” “A gold standard provides a perfectly stable measure of value, like a yardstick provides a stable measure of length, because it fixes the definition of the monetary unit,” and “The quantity of money is self-regulating under a gold standard only if we outlaw fractional-reserve banking in favor of one hundred percent reserves.”

Chapter 2. A “gold standard” means a monetary system in which a defined mass of gold coin or bullion is the unit of account in which prices are posted and accounts kept, and gold coin or bullion is the medium of redemption that ordinary currency and bank accounts promise to pay. Once modern banking developed, the vast majority of money was held and spent in the form of banknotes and deposit transfers, not coins. A monometallic gold standard with bank-issued money avoids problems created by legally imposing bimetallism. A series of supply-and-demand diagrams explains how a gold standard works to determine the quantity and purchasing power of money. The diagrams show how market forces stabilize the purchasing power of gold in response to various shifts in money demand and supply. A major gold discovery can change the purchasing power of gold by altering the supply from mining, but large discoveries were historically rare. The resource costs of a gold standard, the expenditure of labor and capital to extract and coin gold, have been over-estimated by economists who assume away the role of the banking system in economizing on the amount of gold used for transactions.

The chapter looks at Churchill’s economic ideas as a Liberal and then Conservative and their impact on his actions. Churchill was a free trader and accepted the self-correcting specie-flow mechanism of the Gold Standard. His political economy before 1914 rested on interventions to remove monopoly power and market imperfections that would allow ‘competitive selection’ by free enterprise and encourage individual responsibility. After the war, strains appeared in this coherent set of assumptions. Churchill’s tenure as chancellor was marked by creative accounting for pragmatic political reasons. He remained a devotee of sound finance and balanced budgets, and despite some reservations on the issue of the return of the Gold Standard, he could not go against the advice of Treasury officials and the Bank of England, or his own ‘deeply internalized convictions’ that coincided with their assumptions. After 1929 he took little systematic interest in economics. Churchill’s coherent political economy of free trade and the Gold Standard collapsed and he had nothing in its place.

The centrality of the Bretton Woods international conference (1944) in the reshaping of international economic and financial institutions in the post-war world has always seemed obvious. In this story Keynes has been recognised as a key player, given his central role as a key advisor of the British government (despite his now precarious health). The mythology of Bretton Woods has often focussed on a supposed clash between a ‘Keynes Plan’ that sought to introduce the concept of ‘bancor’ as an international currency, and a ‘White Plan’ that was the brainchild of the leading US economist Harry White. But this way of telling the story misses the fact that ‘bancor’, for all its suggestive implications, was never put to the conference as an option. Instead we see Keynes – sadder and wiser than in Paris perhaps – accommodating all along to an American view that ‘a deal’ had to be struck. It was one that crucially involved Britain in paying for the benefit of Lend-Lease by adopting the mantra of ‘non-discrimination’. So here is a revealing example of the priority for expediency over truth in a real-world situation.

By extension of the changing perspectives explored in Chapter 5, in Chapter 6 there follows an exploration of how far Keynes likewise yielded, in his economic thinking in the 1920s, to the realities of a new economic order, challenging his former attachment to the gold standard. The argument here is that the crucial attraction of the gold standard was its rule-bound rationale; yet Keynes, under the impact of events, became disillusioned with a set of rules that now seemed to him less benign in the post-war world. At one level, he criticised the newly powerful United States for failing to exercise its hegemonic influence in the benign manner he had once imputed to British hegemony. At another level, he became sceptical of rules that only debtor countries had to observe, with adverse deflationary effects worldwide.

Social Science Experiments: A Hands-on Introduction is an accessible textbook for undergraduates. Why a hands-on approach that urges readers to roll up their sleeves and conduct their own experiments? When students design their own experiments, they must reflect on basic questions. What is the treatment … and control? Who are the participants? What is the outcome? The process of conducting an experiment builds other important skills: Creating a dataset, inspecting the results, and drawing inferences. Learning is easier when the motivation to acquire specific skills emerges organically through hands-on experience.

Unlike 1720 or 1793–97, the bubble of the 1820s was generated by the financial system itself: The new expansion of the banking system both domestically and internationally, the Bank of England’s monetary policies, the structure of corporate finance, and sovereign lending practices produced the bubble without any need for malfeasance or exogenous shocks. The bubble burst in late 1825, leading to the failure of more than 100 British banks and more than 1.000 businesses. At the height of the Panic of 1825, the decision about priorities and interests was taken not by a political sovereign or a regulatory legal institution, but by a private bank: Rothschilds bailed out the Bank of England, showing the power of financial markets over governance. For the first time, it was clear that financial markets could both cause and end financial crises regardless of political institutions. After 1825, financial crises became a predictable and intelligible part of life, caused by impersonal and abstract international markets, managed by central banks independent of political accountability, explained and analyzed by a self-authorized body of economic thought, with the costs borne by domestic populations and nobody in particular at fault.

The first half of this chapter explores three ways in which modernist writers responded to the economics of their period. It explores modernism’s engagement with the economic horizons of writing and publication; modernism’s understanding of economic thought, ranging across of the ideas of figures such as John Maynard Keynes, Georg Simmel, Marcel Mauss, and Georges Bataille; and modernism’s responses to shifts in the money form itself, particularly changing attitudes towards the gold standard. The second half of the chapter explores the ways in which these issues were navigated in the work of modernist woman writers, including Jean Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf. In revealing and rewriting the relationship between metaphors of femininity and metaphors of money, these writers were able to explore and reimagine the relationship between their own sexual identities and consumer culture; the meanings of race, paternity, and inheritance; and the possibilities of exchange, translation, and a new international order.