DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12355 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Crisis Economics: Keynes and the End of Empire Manu Goswami New York University, New York, NY, USA and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany Correspondence Manu Goswami, Department of History, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA. Email: manu.goswami@nyu.edu 1 INTRODUCTION No single 20 th century economist has garnered more scholarly and popular attention than J. M. Keynes. His 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (GT) is arguably the single most influential work of 20 th century social science, a status that has only grown in the post-2008 years of protracted economic and financial dislocations. Yet prevailing contextualizations of Keynes's oeuvre—especially the consequential break from neoclassical orthodoxy effected in the GT—cleave to a particular and particularizing geography, one that obscures the historically specific imperial scale of its emergence and constitution. Keynes's departure from neoclassical economics has predominantly been framed in relation to other Oxbridge economists (whether his rival Arthur Pigou or their common mentor, Arthur Marshall), competing European schools and economists (most prominently Friedrich Hayek), the economic interna- tionalism that undergirded the prewar configuration of British liberalism, or the cultural modernism associated with the Bloomsbury circle. 1 At issue with such delimitations of the Keynesian Revolution is their unacknowledged method- ological Keynesianism. By this I mean that they proceed as if the postwar and post-imperial global order of normative nation-states was already in place by the time Keynes started writing. They thereby conflate the world order that the adoption of Keynesian policies helped secure with the contextual genesis of Keynes's theory in a dual crisis of capitalism and the economic internationalism that had undergirded Britain's Empire. The institutional, conceptual, and material scale of the economy that Keynes's theory sought to re-orient and rescue was constitutively imperial, not national. The adoption of Keynesian policies of macroeconomic management in war-time Britain and in the postwar decades across the Atlantic helped spawn national economies as structuring scalar units of governance, productive infrastructures, and everyday life. In the Global North during the cold war era, this entailed a model of capitalism secured by social wel- fare policies that institutionalized Keynesian demand management, collective bargaining, monopoly pricing, and the generalization of mass consumption norms—a matrix that, however leaky and porous, presupposed the nation-state as the politico-economic and territorial matrix of sovereignty. In the Global South, strategies of development (whether pursued through an export-led or import-substitution models of industrialization) as instituted by newly sovereign nation-states across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, similarly presumed that national economies were the basic unit of global capitalism. But Keynes's work was rooted in a historically specific order of imperial capitalism and governance, not the postwar and post-imperial world of bounded, sovereign, and formally equal nation-states forged amid succes- sive waves of decolonization. Today's heterodox economists uphold Keynes as a pre-eminent exemplar of the concept of crisis economics, refer- ring thereby to both the pragmatic, problem-oriented thrust of his theory and the central place it granted to considera- tions of crisis as a regular feature of economic life (Foley, 2010, pp. 413–422; Mirowski, 2014; Roubini & Mihm, 2011). Until the1920s and 1930s, the term crisis in economic thought had been associated above all with a European Marxian 18 c  2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cons Constellations. 2018;25:18–34.