War-Time Financial Problems

War Time Financial Problems is a book by Hartley Withers, the English financial journalist who lived from 1867 to 1950 and who was one of the most influential British writers on banking and finance during the late Victorian and early twentieth century period. Withers served as the City editor of The Times of London for many years and then as the editor of The Economist from 1916 to 1921, a period that included most of the financial crises and adjustments of the First World War.

The book was first published in 1919 and presents Withers’s analysis of the various financial problems that the British government and the British economy had faced during the war years and were continuing to face in the immediate post war period. The subjects covered include the financing of the war through borrowing and taxation, the various measures taken to control inflation and to manage the foreign exchanges, the suspension and eventual restoration of the gold standard, the relationship between government finance and the broader London money market, and the various practical questions about how the British financial system should be reorganised for post war conditions.

Withers was one of the leading proponents of careful explanation of complex financial questions to general educated readers, and his various books from the late Edwardian period through the early 1920s did substantial work in making the actual mechanics of modern banking and finance comprehensible to readers without specialist training. The Meaning of Money of 1909 had been his major popular success in this mode, and War Time Financial Problems extends the same method to the much more complicated and politically charged questions raised by the war.

The book reflects the particular Edwardian and early twentieth century British financial orthodoxy within which Withers worked. He was a defender of the gold standard, sceptical of the various forms of monetary innovation that the war had necessarily produced, and committed to what he understood as the careful technical management of the financial system that the City of London had developed across the nineteenth century. The book is therefore both a useful primary document of the period and an example of the kind of orthodox financial thinking that the inter war crises and eventually John Maynard Keynes would substantially challenge.

For readers of the financial and economic history of the First World War and the immediate post war period, the book is essential. It pairs naturally with Withers’s other works and with the broader contemporary literature.