Power Relations and Monetary Ideas: The Case of the Gold-Exchange Standard in India

Ghislain Deleplace ()
Additional contact information
Ghislain Deleplace: LED - Laboratoire d'Economie Dionysien - UP8 - Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: For de Cecco power relations are central in the working of the pre-WWI international gold standard. He gives an illustration of that in the chapter of Money and Empire devoted to the relationship between Britain and India, where the gold-exchange standard is presented as a way for Britain to get hold of India's trade surplus with the rest of the world in order to balance her own international accounts. On the contrary, Keynes praised the Indian gold-exchange standard as a system which not only allowed stabilising India's relations with the outside world but also pointed the way to a better-regulated monetary system for any country, in the line of Ricardo's Ingot Plan nearly one century older. The same notion may thus be seen alternatively as a powerful tool of domination or as a good practical idea. The paper describes how Lindsay adapted Ricardo's scheme to India and contrasts de Cecco's and Keynes's interpretations of the Indian gold-exchange standard, before suggesting that monetary ideas can prevail in their own right when they are theoretically well-founded and practically feasible, independently of the power relations they may reflect.

Keywords: Gold exchange Standard; India; De Cecco; Keynes John M; Lindsay; Ricardo David (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fdg, nep-his, nep-mon and nep-pke
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04253424
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Review of Political Economy, 2023, 35 (2), pp.394-406. ⟨10.1080/09538259.2022.2099659⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-04253424/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04253424

DOI: 10.1080/09538259.2022.2099659

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().