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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper studies the correspondence exchanged in 1938–1939 between Keynes and the French translator of General Theory , Jean de Largentaye, and between Keynes and Sraffa on this translation. The focus is on some analytical difficulties raised in this correspondence. After having described the circumstances of Sraffa's involvement, the paper evokes a disagreement between Keynes and Largentaye about the kind of language that should be used in a book like General Theory. A section deals with clarifications and improvements brought about by the correspondence, particularly on the treatment of entrepreneurs' profits and on the behaviour of lenders and borrowers in a financial crisis. Another section studies an important amendment to Chapter 17 on the concept of own-rate of interest. This amendment was suggested by Largentaye and accepted by Keynes in the context of various critiques expressed elsewhere by Pigou, Hicks, and Sraffa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The orthodox view on Ricardo's monetary theory is that it inconsistently mixes a commodity-theory of money and a quantity-theory of money. One aim of the paper is at discarding this view and at suggesting another, based on Ricardo's distinction between a position in which money "conforms" to the standard and positions in which money depreciates or appreciates because its quantity is inadequate. The paper also shows that, in spite of differences on particular points, the basic aspects of this approach are shared by other scholars, so that one may speak of an unorthodox view on Ricardo's theory of money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]