This project, building on previous years of work by research assistants, aims to investigate American financial cooperation following the First World War and the influence of John Maynard Keynes in shaping the Anglo-American alliance across the first half of the 20th century. Picking up from where previous research assistants left off, my archival work mostly involved Keynes’ writings and correspondence from 1920 to the early 1930s, in the prelude to the publication of his General Theory.
Methods
Over the past few years, Dr Morrison has developed a programme to splice Keynes’ writings into separate text files, with the long-term goal in mind of creating a fully searchable archive of every article, essay or letter that the economist produced. To splice these writings, the programme searches for markers in the text to delineate a new document, which contain a specific title, date and location in the original book provided. It was my primary task to scour the official compilations of Keynes’ writings and insert these markers into digitised copies. Since the digitised copies I worked with were scans transcribed by optical character recognition software, I needed to carefully proofread each different volume of writing, making corrections where I identified the software fell short. Since each writing or correspondence will become an individual file, I needed to substantively organise editorial notes, ensuring they are included in the relevant newly spliced sections. I conducted most of my editing in the cross-platform code editor ‘Sublime Text’, which allowed me to work at a faster pace by harnessing shortcuts to easily make edits, and syntax highlighting to which made spliced sections easily identifiable as I went back and forth between my edits. To ensure my modifications were kept up-to-date with Dr Morrison’s copy of the texts, I used the free and open-source peer-to-peer software ‘Syncthing’ to synchronise the archival files between our PCs.
Results
Working on this research project has made me grasp and appreciate the complex processes of thought generation, revision and deliberation that went into producing Keynes’ General Theory of Money and Employment. As an international relations student, where the focus is on breadth, Keynesian thought featured only minimally in my international political economy module this year. This project provided a depth that allowed for some truly remarkable insights. Another key strength of the project is that it mostly involves independent working. This enabled me to structure when I worked according to the intensity of different periods in my academic calendar.
Analysing Keynes’ writings and correspondent as an investor is crucial to understanding how his General Theory came about, as it was through his experimentation with the stock market and observation of business cycles across multiple national economies that he fully began to formulate an idea of how markets worked. Despite exuding a strong sense of confidence throughout his seminal texts, this archival work reveals how Keynes consistently tested his ideas, seeking trusted friends and colleagues to review and challenge his writings.
Elucidating the rigorous testing of Keynes’ economic propositions are his exchanges with Ralph Hawtrey, who extensively challenged Keynes on his reasoning and the clarity of his arguments. Working on this project makes one appreciate how much of received wisdom in modern economics is the product of debate. I also found it very interesting that Keynes was, in 1940, still providing advice to an investment fund despite being formally employed as a government economic adviser. Although it was not prohibited at the time, this is now considered insider trading.
Personal Experience
The size and scale of the research project is truly remarkable. The chance to undertake archival work and explore Keynes’ writings in extensive detail has provided me with valuable insights into what it is like to work on a research project. Additionally, having to directly build on the work of previous research assistants has taught me how important collaboration is to projects this sizable. By providing an opportunity for me to work on this project, the US Centre has allowed me to strengthen the research skills necessary to conduct research work in academic and corporate settings. I am much more self-assured in my ability to undertake archival work. Also, I am very grateful that this experience has helped me secure a further internship opportunity this summer where I will employ the new research skills I have gained working for the US centre. I am honoured to have contributed to Dr Morrison’s project and strongly recommend future students to apply for this research assistant opportunity.