ABSTRACT
In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes argued that the halcyon days of what he often referred to as “the glorious nineteenth century” had ended and that a healthy economy could not be recreated without fundamental changes in the structure of Britain’s economic system. Keynes used the occasion to make public for the first time his belief that Europe stood at the interstices between two epochs of economic history, one known and the other yet to be determined. Keynes’s main argument about the inevitable passing of the old order was that the conditions that made the high growth rate in Europe in the nineteenth century possible were inherently transitory. According to the economic historian and macroeconomist Barry Eichengreen, the interwar British economy did in fact suffer from investment stagnation as Keynes claimed. Levels of investment spending were much too low to generate anything near full employment.
