Patricia Clavin estimates roughly four million deaths followed the armistice through 1923.
1. In Our Time: History examines John Maynard Keynes's 1919 book The Economic Consequences of the Peace and the Treaty of Versailles.
2. Margaret Macmillan, Michael Cox, and Patricia Klavan bring expertise in international history, international relations, and modern European history to Keynes's political and economic arguments.
3. The episode asks whether Keynes merely warned that Versailles would fail or also helped shape the political consequences he feared.
4. Margaret Macmillan says Germany requested an armistice after its lines collapsed, its allies withdrew, and essential supplies and ammunition ran short.
5. Macmillan explains that Ludendorff and Hindenburg later blamed Germany's civilian government, strengthening the belief that Germany had not truly lost.
6. The Paris conference began in January 1919 to set terms for Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire.
7. Macmillan says the conference became a form of world government as revolutions, starvation, disease, and political violence spread across Europe.
8. Michael Cox explains that Keynes joined the Treasury in 1915 and worked on inter-Allied debts owed to the United States.
9. Cox says Keynes was young and junior but became central because of his economic knowledge, statistics, credit expertise, and influential connections.
10. Patricia Klavan describes blockades that restricted food and raw materials reaching Germany, Austria, Hungary, their allies, and parts of Russia.
11. Klavan says Austria was also blockaded by Czechoslovakia and Poland after the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated.
12. Klavan connects malnutrition, tuberculosis, typhus, population movements, and political violence with roughly four million deaths by about 1923.
13. Keynes's mother Florence Keynes and sister Margaret supported campaigns connected to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
14. Klavan links Keynes's family to Eglantine Jebb, founder of the Save the Children Fund and a campaigner against the blockade.
15. Cox argues that Keynes viewed the war as a civil conflict within Europe and retained a liberal and partly Germanophile perspective.
16. Macmillan says Keynes imagined restoring a prewar world connected by trade, investment, and the movement of people and commodities.
17. The panel describes The Economic Consequences of the Peace as a polemic Keynes wrote in roughly six weeks after resigning from the Paris negotiations.
18. Macmillan and Cox discuss Keynes's harsh portraits of Georges Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson, and David Lloyd George, alongside his criticism of reparations and debt.
19. Readers of Keynes, Versailles, and postwar Europe.
20. Listeners seeking light entertainment or modern economics.
