Zach Carter: belief

Transcript context

…What do you think of the substance of Keynes’s work for the India Office? It’s interesting. [laughs] He has a lengthy report on — I haven’t reviewed this in years — he has a lengthy report on conditions after a type of recession in India where he says, essentially, the British government’s response has been rather lackadaisical and a lot of suffering has happened. You can see his superiors are like, “This is a little bit too much, can you tone it down?” And he does. At this point in his life, he’s thinking about liberalism and internationalism. He thinks of the British Empire as this grand liberal enterprise that is bringing freedom and democracy and prosperity to the rest of the world. I think he views the relationship with India like everybody in Britain — it’s the essential British colony, economically, in terms of resources. I don’t think he ever really questions seriously what the substance of that relationship means, based on the economic relationships that he is analyzing. He is looking at the India issue as a very technical and narrow issue, largely on how the gold standard operates and how India, not allowing the convertibility of gold within its borders, functions. It’s a narrow and technocratic analysis. I don’t think he’s focused on the big questions with India the way he would later be when he would be working in Treasury during the war. I think of the India Office as having been good for Keynes. It made him less conformist. But if you look at his writings on Malthus, he was obsessed with Malthus at the time. He talked about competition between the races. He was interested in eugenics. He has a lot of remarks about India that show a bigger-picture concern, but one that’s very non-egalitarian, so I view Keynes on India as decidedly anti-egalitarian. Would you agree with that?…

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