The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter

ONE
After the Gold Rush

J OHN MAYNARD KEYNES WAS not an athletic man. Though a spirited
debater, he had always suffered from fragile health. Overworked by choice
and underexercised out of habit, he had acclimated himself to living in the
constant shadow of head colds and influenza attacks. He was thirty-one
years old on the first Sunday of August 1914 and had lived nearly all of
those years at Cambridge, where, like his father before him, he held a minor
academic post. His friend and mentor Bertrand Russell was accustomed to
seeing the younger man reviewing figures or buried in papers on weekend
afternoons. A King’s College man, Keynes might, in moments of extreme
restlessness, calm himself with a walk through the Great Court of Russell’s
Trinity College, taking in the turreted medieval towers of King’s Gate, the
soaring gothic windows of the chapel built during the reign of Queen
Elizabeth, and the steady waters of the fountain designed when William
Shakespeare had composed Hamlet. Keynes was a man who savored
tradition and contemplation. He was perfectly suited for a life at the
timeworn university.
But there was Keynes, hustling down the weathered flagstones that
afternoon, tearing past the lush, closely cropped green lawns. Russell
stopped his young friend to ask what was wrong. Keynes, with a brusque

flutter of words, told him he needed to get to London. “Why don’t you go
by train?” the philosopher asked.
“There isn’t time,” Keynes replied to the baffled Russell and hurried
along.
There were more curiosities to come. Keynes left the court and
approached a motorcycle belonging to his brother-in-law, Vivian Hill.
Keynes—who was nearly six feet seven—folded his long legs into the
sidecar, and the two proceeded to putter and jostle their way sixty miles to
the capital. Their odd, frantic journey would change the fate of the British
Empire.

England was in the fifth day of the most violent financial crisis it had ever
experienced—one that threatened to tear its economy apart even as the
nation’s leaders wrestled over the most momentous diplomatic question of
their generation: whether to enter the war breaking out on the European
continent. Though none of the foreign policy experts and financial
engineers huddled in London recognized it at the time, the economic system
that had fed and fueled Europe for the past half century had just come to a
sudden, cataclysmic end.
Since the close of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the world’s great
powers—and many of its minor players—had grown to depend on complex
international trade arrangements to provide their citizens with everything
from basic foodstuffs to heavy machinery. It was an era of ostentatious
prosperity for both the aristocracy and an expanding, increasingly powerful
middle class, a period future generations would romanticize with names like
“La Belle Époque” and “The Gilded Age.”
In England, factory workers
spun Egyptian cotton and New Zealand wool into fineries that decorated
homes all over the continent. The well-to-do and the up-and-coming
adorned themselves with diamonds and ivory from South Africa embedded
in settings crafted from gold mined in Australia. In Paris, the Hôtel Ritz
served afternoon tea from India, while a new mode of haute cuisine spread
through the luxury hotels of Europe, combining ingredients from the New

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter