Indian currency and finance

International audience"The Indian monetary system attracted the attention of leading nineteenth-century authors – such as Léon Walras and Alfred Marshall – and of some young economists of the beginning of the twentieth century. This chapter presents John Maynard Keynes’s diagnosis of the Indian monetary system and his contributions to the formulation of the gold-exchange standard made in 1913. The section following the introduction focuses on the process and context in which Keynes wrote his first book. The next section deals with the main ideas that constitute this new monetary regime known as the gold-exchange standard, which was specially designed for India. The subsequent two sections introduce the necessity of the creation of a central bank for India (State Bank) and discuss the reception of the Indian Currency and Finance to show the importance of this work. Thanks to the success that Keynes had with this publication in 1913, he was, at the age of 30, a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Finance and Currency, secretary of the Royal Economic Society and editor of the Economic Journal.