This is a major study of economic policy making in Britain between the wars. It provided the first full-length analysis of the early development of fiscal policy as a tool of modern economic management. The central question addressed is how Keynesian fiscal policies came to be adopted by the British government, with particular attention paid to the role of the Treasury and to that of Keynes himself.

Drawing extensively on unpublished documents hitherto untapped by economists or historians, Roger Middleton challenges the widely held view of official economic thinking as an...