Piero Sraffa’s Internment on the Isle of Man in 1940 as a British ‘Enemy Alien’

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Carter, Scott and Lazzarini, Andres. 2025. Piero Sraffa’s Internment on the Isle of Man in 1940 as a British ‘Enemy Alien’. Review of Political Economy, ISSN 0953-8259 [Article] (In Press)

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Official URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/095382...

Abstract or Description

On 10 June 1940, the Axis power of Italy declared war on Great Britain and France. Shortly thereafter the British government extended to Italians its policy of internment that had previously applied to Austrian and German nationals living within its borders. In this essay the authors present newly declassified documents from the British Home Office as well as previously unearthed correspondence by Keynes from the Wren Library that bring color to the story of Sraffa being caught up in this fervor which resulted in his internment on the Isle of Man for a three-month period. The new evidence uncovers John Maynard Keynes in a fever pitch to secure the safety and eventual release of Sraffa and a few other Continental colleagues also caught up in this geopolitical quagmire. While in internment Sraffa was able to have delivered from the publisher a brand-new copy of the Aveling and Moore English translation of Marx’s Capital, Volume I. Sraffa studied this volume with great intensity while in confinement as evidenced by the scores of various markings he made in that volume, including a two-page index he had written out on the last pages of the volume.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1080/09538259.2025.2466009

Additional Information:

JEL Codes: B24; B31; B51

"This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Review of Political Economy on 5 February 2025, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09538259.2025.2466009. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited."

Keywords:

John Maynard Keynes; internment; Marx’s Capital; Piero Sraffa

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Institute of Management Studies
Institute of Management Studies > Structural Economic Analysis

Dates: