In 1945, as World War II came to an end, Britain was forced to accept decolonization, to wind down its empire, and India began preparing for independence. The country was at the time the fourth largest industrial economy in the world. In preparation for modernization after independence, the (British) Government of India initiated a new scheme for jump-starting scientific and technological development. Every year a number of gifted Indian students would be selected for training abroad in scientific and technological areas. They would be provided with full scholarships to study abroad for a higher degree or certificate. Under the terms of these scholarships, after the completion of their studies, they would be expected to return to India where the government promised that an appropriate job would be waiting for them.

A Surprise in London

Khorana was in the first cohort of students selected in 1945. Given his background in xanthone chemistry, he was specifically selected by the Ministry of Agriculture for further training in Britain on the chemistry of insecticides and fungicides. The hope was that, on returning to India, this training would benefit agricultural development through better pest control. He was assigned to an institute in Berkshire. The Indian High Commission in London was given the responsibility of securing his admission. Khorana set sail for Britain, expecting a future career in agricultural chemistry.

However, late in 1945, when Khorana arrived in London, he was shocked to find out that the expected position in Berkshire had not materialized. British institutions were overcrowded after the end of World War II from the return of ex-servicemen wanting to continue with their training. There were no slots left for others, especially candidates from the colonies, in most places. As a result, the Indian High Commission had failed to secure the expected position in Berkshire.

Instead, without consulting Khorana (who was in transit on a ship), because of his M.Sc. in organic chemistry, the High Commission had secured for him a regular Ph.D. studentship, that is, one dedicated to basic research, in Organic Chemistry at the University of Liverpool. Faced with no other choice, Khorana accepted the assignment and moved to Liverpool. He would later come to regard it as an extraordinarily lucky development and interpret it as yet another occasion when serendipity had favored him.

Kenya and the Politics of a Postcolony critically examines key themes in the politics of Kenya from the establishment of British colonialism in the late nineteenth century to the end of the Uhuru Kenyatta presidency in 2022. The largest economy in East Africa, Kenya has remained relatively peaceful since the time of independence from Britain in 1963 even when the region has periodically been engulfed in civil strife and political turmoil. On account of this, the country serves as an anchor for Western strategic interests in the region and many international organizations and media houses have set up their regional offices in Nairobi, Kenya's bustling capital city. Indeed, Kenya is the only country outside of the global north to host the headquarters of a United Nations agency. It is home to the headquarters of the United Nations Environmental Program, which is located in the Gigiri suburbs of Nairobi. It is this important country, both regionally and internationally, that this book is all about.

The book is thematically split into nine chapters with a concluding tenth chapter. The first chapter explores the roots of colonialism as a pernicious global enterprise. It explains why colonialism, types of colonialism, and the uses that colonies were put to, with particular focus on Africa. It examines the rise of anticolonial nationalism in Africa, concluding with an exposition of the different waves of decolonization on the continent. Chapter 2 focuses on the colonial context of the making of contemporary Kenya, from the establishment of British colonialism in 1895 to independence in 1963. The chapter grapples with the most critical issues that defined the political development of Kenya within this colonial context. These include the White settler demands, the Indian question, the land and labor issue, and the rise of anticolonial nationalism. These critical issues in the colony are examined with the objective of evaluating their impact and implications in the making of contemporary Kenya.

Chapter 3 focuses on political independence and the betrayal of anticolonial nationalism. It notes that whereas anticolonial nationalism was characterized by interethnic unity, within the first decade of independence, the sense of unity and collective purpose irreparably atrophied, and, by the end of the decade, it had virtually died. More than six decades since independence, Kenya is much less of a nation than it was in 1963.

The second war produced a watershed in twentieth-century economics. Together with the dominance of the profession by purely academic economists came the disappear¬ance of what might be called financial macroeconomists whose principal concern was the explanation of the interaction of finance and investment in the context of economic fluctuations. Although there has been a renewed interest in business cycles, it has concen-trated on ‘real’ factors, while ‘finance’ has become a separate discipline concentrating on the microeconomics of efficient markets and some aspects of rational expectations.

One of the founders of the financial macroeconomics approach was Irving Fisher. He was part of a group of economists which included Hayek, Böhm-Bawerk, Schumpeter, Wicksell, Hawtrey, Robertson and Keynes to name a few. Although these economists came from diverse theoretical backgrounds, a common denominator was active par¬ticipation in financial markets, either through private or public sector experience. This background of institutional knowledge provided support for their distinctive theoretical approach, which recognized that monetary and financial factors are important deter¬minants of the behavior of the economy. This common background may also be noted from the fact that despite theoretical difference, Keynes was outspoken in acknowledg¬ment that ‘it was Irving Fisher who … first influenced me strongly towards regarding money as a “real” factor’ (1973, pp. 202–203, n.2). In particular, Keynes suggested that his theory of investment, based on the marginal efficiency of capital, ‘was first intro¬duced by Irving Fisher in his Theory of Interest (1930) under the designation “the rate of return over cost”. This conception of his is, I think, the most important and fruitful of his recent conceptions’ (Fisher, 1930, p. 103). Indeed, the modern financial analyst would be surprised to discover in The Nature of Capital and Income (1906) and The Theory of Interest, most of the basic tools of time value analysis of investment including spot and forward yield curves.

It is unfortunate that much of this part of Fisher's work has fallen from the standard economics curriculum. In the post-war view of economics, Fisher is generally character¬ized as a forerunner of modern monetarism in which money has no permanent influ¬ence, and as the proponent of the rule that nominal interest rates reflect the adjustment of underlying, stable real rates of interest to rationally anticipated inflation. These sug¬gest the rather extreme position that the rate of interest is determined by productivity and that monetary factors have no permanent impact.

In 1950, Khorana and Kenner were reunited in Todd's laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Though neither could possibly have realized it at the time, Cambridge was emerging as one of the centers of a new molecular revolution that, during the next decade, would permanently transform biology. Central to the emergence of molecular biology was the “Unit for Research on the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems” set up in 1947 by the (British) Medical Research Council (MRC), originally to further the research of Max Perutz and John Kendrew in using X-ray diffraction to study proteins with the goal of determining their three-dimensional structure at an atomic resolution, a feat that had never before been attempted. Perutz and Kendrew would solve the myoglobin molecule in 1957 and hemoglobin in 1959 to be rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962.

In the early 1950s, the MRC Unit rapidly expanded its interest into other areas, including the structure of DNA, which would be elucidated on site by Francis H. C. Crick and James D. Watson using data from the work of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin. The result was the double helix model for DNA, which was first published in 1953, and soon became the most visible icon of the new molecular biology. The unit was initially located in the Physics Department at the Cavendish Laboratory, indicating a perceived centrality of physics for the new molecular characterization of biological problems. Crick, who later became one of Khorana's closer intellectual interlocutors, had a background in physics and joined the MRC Unit in 1949, shortly before Khorana returned to Cambridge, but there is no evidence that they became acquainted at the time. The organic chemists lived in another world. Nevertheless, it was fortuitous that Todd also worked on nucleic acids. Khorana thus was kept aware of recent developments in that field.

Meanwhile, closer to Khorana's everyday work, in the Department of Biochemistry, Frederick Sanger was taking the chemical analysis of proteins to a new level of precision. That proteins consisted of polypeptides or amino acid residue chains (which means the same thing) had been known since the turn of the twentieth century.

When I arrived as a research student under Joan Robinson's supervision in the University of Cambridge Faculty of Economics and Politics in the late 1980s the capital theory controversies were still dominating students and faculty discussions. These debates had only arrived on the periphery of graduate education in the US, but I had the benefit of what was then considered an alternative training in Keynes from Paul Davidson's tutelage which required detailed knowledge of Keynes’ Treatise on Money and General Theory supplemented by Sidney Weintraub's influence on Davidson and Smolensky's Aggregate Supply and Demand textbook presentation of Keynes. How Joan Robinson's “big book”, as the Accumulation of Capital was known, fit into this framework was far from clear to Davidson and his students. In the US economists were more concerned with the impact of the “classical dichotomy” on Keynes's monetary theory.

In England the focus was on the derivation of an alternative to the marginal theory of distribution implicit in the capital aggregate in the production function represented by Keynesian aggregate theories of growth and distribution formulated by Kaldor, Robinson and Kalecki. By the time I arrived in Cambridge criticism of capital the-ory had evolved to accommodate the more direct attack based on Sraffa's Production of Commodities, reinforced by Pierangelo Garegnani's own developments and presence to highlight the lacunae in marginal price theory. The state of the debate was presented in Geoff Harcourt's popular representation in Some Cambridge Controversies in the Theory of Capital.

At the time it was common to refer to all this as the “Anglo-Italian” theory, but there was little that was common to the two approaches. Joan Robinson sat in the centre of this combination, having credited Sraffa with the hint that produced her classic book on imperfect competition, while adopting a Marshallian framework, which the same work by Sraffa had criticized, as the framework for understanding the generalization of the General Theory to the long period reflecting Harrodian dynamics. My arrival in Cambridge was to understand where money and uncertainty fit into all this, but instead my attention was refocused on answering the question of “what determines the rate of profit” – which implicitly bridged the differences between the attack on one-commodity models with aggregate capital and the alternative Italian criticism since the response required an understanding of the denominator.

I. BACKGROUND: KEYNES AND THE 1914 CRISIS

According to Hicks (1977, p. 45) monetary economics differs from other branches of economics because “a large part of the best work on Money is topical … prompted by particular episodes, by particular experiences of the writer's own time”. This reflects his earlier (1967, p. 156) opinion that “monetary theories arise out of monetary dis¬turbances. This is obviously true of the General Theory, which is the book of the Great Depression - the World Depression - of the nineteen-thirties”.

Yet the great slump could have had only a relatively small impact on Keynes’ work in monetary economics which had started well before the generalised conditions of either British or World depression. A relatively more important influence must have been the “monetary disturbance” of 1914.

Indeed, Keynes at the early age of thirty-one was piloted from Cambridge to London in the side-car of his brother-in-law's motor cycle in order to advise the government on the incipient bank crisis at the outbreak of the First War. It was as a result of this activ¬ity that he literally became the international financial system during the war period: “I was in the Treasury throughout the war and all the money we either lent or borrowed passed through my hands” (JMK, XVI, p. 3, the editor of the volume comments “He hardly exaggerated, as he was directly concerned with the strategy of financing Britain's war expenditure and that of her allies, and finally took charge of a division of his own responsible for all of Britain's inter-allied financial arrangements”).

This early experience of the 1914 financial crisis introduced Keynes to certain fea¬tures of the monetary system which were to remain a permanent part of his theoretical approach to economic analysis. One characteristic feature of this system was that “the bill upon London was an international currency which could be negotiated anywhere … A mountain of credit of unprecedented size was reared up internally upon the reserve of the Bank of England, and that reserve was amazingly small” (Feaveryear, 1931, p. 299.) In general terms the City operated just as an international bank relending to the Empire the proceeds of their export surpluses on England which were held on deposit in sterling (an excellent analysis of the operation of the system is given in de Cecco, 1974).

The circuit approach has done much to reawaken interest in Keynes's monetary theory of production and to extend it in new directions. Yet, it appears to remain confined within the limits of the industrial circulation of Keynes's Treatise; it thus does not deal with the determination of investment goods prices nor can it deal with the differential determination of the prices of assets and liabilities introduced in the General Theory in terms of the marginal efficiency of capital and liquidity preference. Since the impor¬tance of money in Keynes's theory is intimately linked with these concepts, it leads us to conclude that circuit theory needs further development in order to capture Keynes's views on the dominance of money over the real sector in a capitalist economy.

Who Is the Prince of Denmark?

The Cambridge-based Keynesian theories of growth and distribution developed in the 1950s and 1960s were presented as extensions or ‘generalizations’ of Keynes's General Theory. While they were sharply criticized by neoclassical economists, their develop¬ment was also accompanied by ‘internal’ criticism which only became externally evi¬dent sometime after the ‘Cambridge Debates’ had come to be classified as a history of economic thought. The first of these internal criticisms was associated with neo-Ricard¬ian economists who emphasized the differences between capital theory based on the generalization of Keynes's General Theory and on Sraffa's Production of Commodities. The second came from American post Keynesians such as Davidson and Minsky, as well as from Austrian economists such as Ludwig Lachmann, who criticized the emphasis on static or steady-state analysis when it was the process of history that the theory was trying to explain. Both of these criticisms concerned the role of uncertainty and expec-tations in the theory, the former was critical because it was too great, the latter because it was too small.

A third line of criticism, usually, but not always linked to the second, came from economists who considered Keynes's revolution to have been primarily concerned with monetary theory and considered the long-run models of steady growth in which money played no active role as unacceptable, if not unKeynesian. They argued that Keynes's conception of liquidity should play a crucial role in long-period analysis or else such analysis should be abandoned.

I INTRODUCTION

One of the most perplexing facts in interpreting post-war developments of Keynes's theory is his comment on Hicks's now-famous ‘Mr Keynes and the Classics’. Although Hicks himself has in recent years become critical of the uses to which his IS–LM appa¬ratus has been put, he still stands by it as representing the essence of Keynes's theory and supports his contention by reference to what he interprets as Keynes's tacit agree¬ment with the contents of his 1937 paper: ‘Keynes accepted the IS–LM diagram as a fair statement of his position’ (Hicks, 1977, p. 146).

The present chapter has two goals. The first is to assess Keynes's pointed criticism of the representation of the rate of interest upon which Hicks's 1937 paper was based. The second is to attempt an explanation of IS–LM which might be interpreted as a ‘fair representation’ of Keynes's theory. These two goals permit discussion of what I believe to be the most often overlooked aspect of Keynes's theory, the indissoluble rela¬tion between the multiplier and the liquidity preference explanation of money prices.

II KEYNES's CRITICISM OF ‘MR KEYNES AND THE CLASSICS’

The careful reader of Keynes's comments in his exchange of letters with Hicks (CW, XIV: pp. 74ff.) will note two points. Hicks centred his comparison of Keynes and the Classics on the effect of an increase in expenditure on the rate of interest. What Hicks calls ‘Mr Keynes's special theory’, ‘yields the startling conclusion that an increase in the inducement to invest, or in the propensity to consume, will not tend to raise the rate of interest, but only to increase employment’ (Hicks, 1982, p. 107). Keynes comments on this characterisation of his position:

Introduction

Migrants who came to Denmark in the 1960s and the 1970s mainly sought work there. Danish society hastily recruited a workforce from other countries (Jørgensen and Thomsen, 2013). Some of these laborers originated in Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, and Pakistan. As many of them were unskilled, they were employed in factories. In addition, both migrants and Danish society expected migrants to eventually return to their homelands as soon as their contracts terminated. Over time, however, destiny took its course as the so-called guest migrants, many of whom were young men, interacted with the Danes and gradually learned the language and culture. Some even intermarried with the Danes (Rytter, 2010). Furthermore, Danish volunteers also facilitated migrants’ learning basic Danish and assisted them in overcoming minor administrative and technical hurdles in society. At the time, Danish generosity mainly consisted of private undertakings, including people volunteering for mentoring tasks for migrants to adjust and become part of society. In this period, society did not fully develop institutional platforms for migrant and refugee education (Pedersen and Smith, 2001). Those who want to learn the language and society will have to do so on their own. The political situation was comparatively more relaxed and flexible. Similar to other European societies, Danish society needed labor to reconstruct the country after World War II. One obvious option is to recruit an additional workforce from abroad. Due to politically collaborative policies and diverting strategies, the Danes managed to save their country and society from German destruction (Dethlefsen, 1990). The open migration policy situation changed later, particularly when there was a lesser economic boom due to oil and other economic fluctuations and crises (Nannestad, 2004).

Eventually, most male migrants sponsored their wives to join them in Denmark. Consequently, Turks, Pakistanis, and other migrants have established permanent transnational communities, thereby becoming integrated into Danish society. Their children and grandchildren went to school and became more integrated into society as well as in the wider Danish system. Scholars find that communities, such as the Turks and the Pakistanis, have successfully tackled emerging social and political situations in multiple ways (Rytter, 2013).

In this important study, Dr. A. Osman Farah offers us rich descriptions and insightful theorization and conceptualization of dynamics of transnational political and civic mobilization in Aarhus, Denmark. Describing the manifold creative and critical works of AarhusSomali, a transnational civic body consisting of local people of Denmark and refugees and migrants from Somali, Farah also presents us with wider challenges of theories and practices of transnationalization and the limits of nation-state-centric approaches and organization of self, society, and polity now. Farah is a creative activist and scholar who embodies the vision and practice of scholar-activists. This book is an important contribution to this much-needed genre of scholarship in transnational studies and the wider fields of social science and humanities.

In this book, Farah offers us many valuable insights. He writes, for example, how “contemporary transnational societies often quest to overcome objectified nation-state enclosures, often from below. However, such societal processes remain neither static nor conclusive. From non-artificial platforms in the form of human-community-centric transnationalizations, with continuing dynamics of social and political exchanges and modifications, transnational community activities represent an end on their own terms” (p. 34). He also tells us how “In pragmatic terms, communities engage local, national, and transnational platforms through creative platforms, departing from the local contexts in the host society in gradual expansion to other platforms across nations and states.” Transnational civic mobilizations resist repatriation of some Somalis to Somalia. They also contribute to local public policy formation though challenges remain as the local political and administrative leadership have sometimes apriori prejudiced regarding people from Somalia, which came out starkly during the COVID-19 outbreak when the mayor of Aarhus tried to target the local Somali community as sources of spread. AarhusSomali creatively worked to dispel such misinformation and create a positive environment. The problem of Islamophobia is a major challenge in the world today including in Denmark. Here AarhusSomali tries to create conditions for more holistic realization of paths of Islam as well as improving the community image of the Somalis. Farah writes: “In improving the community's image, ArhuSomali engages multiple fronts, both in the form of bonding within the community and the cross-ethnic way of bridging with other communities.” Farah also tells us: “Ordinary people now know more about Islam and the Muslim communities” (p. 88).

This is the term used by Keynes in his General Theory (1936 ) to represent the forces deter¬mining changes in the scale of output and employment as a whole. Keynes attributed the first discussions of the determinants of the supply and demand for output as a whole to the classical economists, in particular the debate between Ricardo and Malthus con¬cerning the possibility of ‘general gluts’ of commodities, or what has come to be known as Say's Law of Markets. Indeed, Keynes's theory was intended to replace Say's Law, although the emergence of effective demand from his Treatise on Money (1930) critique of the quantity theory of money, and his insistence on its application in what he origi¬nally called a ‘monetary production economy’, suggests that it should also be seen in antithesis to classical monetary theory. For Adam Smith (1776, p. 285), ‘A man must be perfectly crazy who … does not employ all the stock which he commands, whether it be his own or other peoples’ on consumption or investment. As long as there was what Smith called ‘tolerable security’, economic rationality implied that it was impossible for demand for output as a whole to diverge from aggregate supply. Although Smith (p. 73) did call the demand ‘sufficient to effectuate the bringing of the commodity to the market’, the ‘effectual demand’ ‘of those who are willing to pay the natural price’ of the commodity, the idea referred to divergence of market from natural price of particular commodities and the process of gravitation of prices to their natural values. J.B. Say's discussion of the problem of the ‘disposal of commodities’ adopted Smith's position. Against those who held that ‘products would always be abundant, if there were but a ready demand, or market for them,’ Say's ‘law of markets’ argued ‘that it is production which opens a demand for products’ (1855, pp. 132–3); if production determined ability to buy, then demand could not be deficient. While excesses in particular markets were admitted, they would always be offset by deficiencies in others.