In 1969, when Don Moggridge joined the editorial team of the Royal Economic Society's project to publish John Maynard Keynes's papers, there still was not a single volume in print. Roy Harrod, Austin Robinson, and Richard Kahn were the original advisory team for the project, and they had hired Elizabeth Johnson to be the Editor in 1954. The first four volumes were nearly ready for publication when Moggridge joined Johnson as Joint Editor in 1969, but even those four volumes were two years away from appearing in print.When the project was launched by the Royal Economic Society, Austin Robinson had declared, “Not like Ricardo!,” in reference to the society's seemingly interminable project to publish David Ricardo's papers.1 But by 1969, the Keynes project was looking very much like another Ricardo. The long delay in getting the first volumes out was in part because, as Austin Robinson (1990: 181) noted, “this was a vast task, much bigger than we had visualized when we began it.” But there was also bad luck involved; Elizabeth Johnson's husband, Harry, had been a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, when she was named as the Editor, but he did not stay in that position for long. His “meteoric career carried her to Manchester, London, Chicago and away from the archive of [Keynes's] papers” (181).Kahn, Harrod, and Robinson had determined at its inception that the project would include not only a reprinting of the ten books Keynes had published in his lifetime but also his academic papers, as well as several Activities volumes that would include selections of his writings on his key policy work. Editing the Activities volumes required extensive reading and careful selection to fully capture Keynes's involvement; as we know now, after the fact, these volumes might include correspondence (both sides), journalism, scholarly essays, internal government memos, reviews, lectures, speeches, and broadcasts. The editing required someone who knew economic theory and international economic history well, and who also had the historical skills to master the intricacies of twentieth-century British economic policymaking.“Progress was worryingly slow until we were lucky enough to find Don Moggridge with his unusual combination of thorough scholarship, quick decision and good judgment as to what to select for publication” (Robinson 1990: 181). Indeed, when the first eight volumes finally appeared in print in 1971, two years after he became the Joint Editor, he had edited four of the eight. Ultimately, he would be responsible for editing twenty-four of the thirty volumes of The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes.2By the mid-1970s, Moggridge had finished the two volumes that had been planned for dealing with the creation of the Treatise on Money and The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. These two volumes (13 and 14, both 1973) grew to include a third (29, 1983) when Lady Keynes moved out of the Keynes home at Tilton in 1976 and sent a previously undiscovered laundry basket of papers to the Editors. These three volumes would eventually serve as the documentary basis for much of the intellectual history of Keynes's greatest work.Volumes 13 and 14 also marked the beginning of a new and growing part of Moggridge's career, his own extensive writing on Keynes. His first refereed article, “From the Treatise to the General Theory: An Exercise in Chronology,” appeared in this journal in 1973, and there would be no looking back.3 The next year, 1974, he wrote the draft of his first, short Keynes biography for Frank Kermode's Fontana Modern Masters series. It was published in 1976 and would subsequently appear in three British editions and an Americanized version, and it would be translated into six languages (German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese). It remains the best short biography available of Keynes's life and work in economic theory and policymaking.Despite the fact that the 1976 biography was a great success, Moggridge allowed himself to be persuaded by Richard Kahn and Geoffrey Keynes to begin work that same year on a longer, fuller biography. Initially, he was not convinced that the longer biography was a good idea. With characteristic candor and humility, he would report later that “I hesitated: I wasn't certain that I had the skills or the judgement necessary for such an enterprise, but, in the end, I convinced myself that there was a case for proceeding” (1997: 42).The biography, published in 1992 as Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography, took him far beyond his work on The Collected Writings, taking him to “new archives—and new visits to old” (Moggridge 1997: 42). There was also the matter of the newly published letters between Maynard and Lydia and documents like Keynes's youthful diary entries detailing his homosexual activities. This was new territory for Moggridge, but he told the full story.Inevitably, the longer biography (one volume) is compared with Skidelsky's three-volume biography. For someone who has not read the two biographies, one straightforward way to explain the difference is by the authors' intent: Skidelsky uses the broad canvas of Keynes's life, his interest in the arts, philosophy, and literature, to try to “rescue him from the economists,”4 to make Keynes someone better than his colleagues and his achievements stand apart from the profession, whereas Moggridge tries to tell the story of a working economist, one who was actively shaping his discipline and whose work cannot be understood apart from it. Moggridge understood very clearly (and acknowledged) the attractions of Skidelsky's biography—that it is well written and connects Keynes to Bloomsbury beautifully, for instance. But as he also documented clearly in his two reviews (2002a, 2002b), Skidelsky's three volumes contain so many errors of fact that they, unfortunately, cannot serve as the biography of record.5Donald Edward Moggridge was born in Windsor, Ontario, on May 25, 1943, the first child of William Robert Moggridge and Doris Livingston Moggridge. He died on April 10, 2021, aged seventy-seven. At the time he was born, and through the fifteen years that the family resided there, Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan, were an open conurbation, undisturbed by the international border that runs between them. Because his father worked for Ford of Canada, the open border was important to facilitate easy movement between the foundry in Windsor, where he worked as a metallurgical engineer, and Ford's world headquarters, which were in Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit. Moggridge recalled going to Detroit in the afternoon after school (by himself) to watch the Detroit Tigers play baseball at the old Briggs Stadium and stopping to buy tobacco for his father on the walk home along Michigan Avenue. In the 1950s, people still walked across the border without needing formal identification papers.6Moggridge attended secondary school at J. C. Patterson Collegiate Institute in Windsor, after what he called an “unremarkable” early education. Because his family lived in a township outside the city that did not have its own secondary schools, Moggridge and his parents got to choose which Windsor high school he would attend. Unlike his peers, who all chose the closest school, he and his family settled on Patterson, which was further away, “because my father had convinced me that it would be better for me to go to the downtown school . . . so that I would come to know people from a broader range of social backgrounds, as well as a much larger proportion of blacks” (1997: 26). This decision reflected, in part, his parents' lifelong interest in the American civil rights movement.Moggridge's mother was active at the national level in the YWCA, serving at one time as president, and this presumably led to his being enrolled as a camper in the YMCA's Camp Pine Crest in 1949 at age six. After he became too old to be a camper, he remained active at Pine Crest until he entered university in 1961, serving first as a summer counselor, then ultimately as the head counselor, or Head Tripper. It was an early indication of someone with exceptional organizational skills.By his own account, it took Moggridge's first year at the University of Toronto to settle into his life as a scholar. Upon entering the university, he chose to join Trinity College, which had the added benefit that it allowed him to live in college. More importantly, he chose to pursue the Honours degree in Political Science and Economics in the Department of Political Economy, one of Toronto's oldest and most distinctive degrees, heavily steeped in economic theory, economic history, and the history of economic thought. Today that distinctive mix of disciplines at Toronto is often associated with Harold Innis; but as Ian Drummond (1983) has shown, Innis had merely put his stamp on a program that already had a strong historical tradition when he took over as department chair in 1937. At any rate, there was arguably no department in North America in the mid-twentieth century with a stronger emphasis on economic history and the history of economic thought than Toronto.Although he was influenced in his first year by a special course Drummond taught on Keynes and The General Theory, Moggridge imagined himself as an economic historian, not a historian of economic thought. He left his undergraduate studies intending to become, like Innis, an economic historian of North America. He had originally applied to several Ivy League universities for graduate study and had his choice of where he would study (Harvard, Yale, or Penn), together with funding from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. In the spring of his final year at Toronto, however, the provost of Trinity happened to have responsibility for filling the Grainger Scholarship for graduate study at King's College, Cambridge, and inquired with Moggridge if he would be interested in applying.All his plans were suddenly changed. His parents had taken a chance on moving to England for a few years in the 1930s, only to be driven back to Canada by the threat of war after only two years. Once he had received the Grainger, Moggridge walked away from his opportunities in the States and set sail for a very different career, figuring that he would always be sorry if he didn't give Cambridge a chance. It was a fateful decision.Moggridge arrived in Britain still intent on writing a dissertation on North American economic history. Not unlike many recent graduates headed to Britain for graduate study, Moggridge made his maiden voyage to Britain on the Queen Mary.7 His arrival in Cambridge was anything but ordinary, however, as he was invited to sherry his first evening in Cambridge with several luminaries, including Richard Kahn, Nicholas Kaldor, Richard Stone, Robin Marris, Luigi Pasinetti, and Joan Robinson (who would be his first graduate supervisor). It was an auspicious beginning.In fairly quick order, Moggridge began to adjust his trajectory. Richard Kahn became his graduate supervisor after his first year when Moggridge had decided that Cambridge was not the best place to write a dissertation on North American economic history and chose to focus instead on British monetary policy.Focusing on the return to the gold standard in 1925, Moggridge found himself, nonetheless, facing a serious problem: the Bank of England refused to share with him the historic data on their holdings of foreign currencies.8 So he did what good economic historians do: he collected his own data. He spent the summer of 1969 in New York City poring through the daily cables in the Federal Reserve Bank (NY) archives, assembling the time series of the Bank of England's foreign currency holdings that he needed for his study. He also was provided access to internal Treasury documents that allowed him to piece together for the first time exactly how the decision to “return to gold” had been made.9This archival work led to his first two books. The first, published before his dissertation was complete, is a monograph driven by the new data he had collected (1969), while the second is a fuller history of Britain's interwar experience with the gold standard (1972). One of Moggridge's central findings was that the return to the gold standard in 1925 was driven by neither economic theory nor data; instead, it was a decision made on moral grounds. It was a promising debut as an economic historian, one equally sensitive to hard data and cultural nuance.But while Moggridge almost certainly continued to see himself first and foremost as an economic historian for at least another decade, his place in the history of economic thought would begin to emerge quickly. Austin Robinson approached him as he finished his dissertation to inquire about his interest in joining Elizabeth Johnson as an Editor of Keynes's Collected Writings. It was only the beginning of a long career as an editor of great economists (see Moggridge 1988).Moggridge was approached at the same time (1968) about the possibility of returning to the University of Toronto, where there was a major hiring initiative underway to strengthen the program in economic history. This prospect was attractive in certain ways, but it would have taken him away from the Keynes papers, and so he decided to stay in Cambridge, where he soon was made a lecturer in economics, the Secretary of the Degree Committee in the Faculty of Economics, and the Fellows' Wine Steward of Clare College, where he had been a Research Fellow while working on his dissertation.Toronto continued to pursue him, however, and after a year of unpaid leave in 1974–75, he returned in 1975 as a thirty-two-year-old Professor of Economics and member of the Graduate Faculty in Economics. Was the return a good idea? Moggridge (1997: 40) judged that the results were “mixed.” His initial appointment caused him to split his time between two of the university's three campuses; his undergraduate teaching was at the suburban Scarborough campus, and his graduate teaching was at the downtown campus. Moggridge did not note this as a personal problem, but rather reflected that it caused isolation for scholars and a general lack of collegiality in the department. The “three campus problem” was partially solved in 1982 with the dissolution of the old Department of Political Economy into separate departments of economics and political science; but change was slow and old habits apparently did not disappear overnight. Moggridge also found new ways to fulfill himself at Toronto.In 1985, he took his first turn at “deaning,” accepting a position as Associate Dean, Social Sciences, in the School of Graduate Studies. He would subsequently serve again as an Associate Dean (in both the School of Graduate Studies and the Faculty of Arts and Science) and later as Vice-Dean in the School of Graduate Studies; once again, he was able to put his exceptional organizational skills to good use. By all accounts, he was excellent at administrative work. He also became involved with the interdisciplinary Committee on Editorial Problems that, on the one hand, placed him squarely in the center of his love of books and, on the other hand, provided him with colleagues who valued his editorial work and could help him to become better at that work.10Unspoken in his estimation that his return to Toronto had produced a “mixed” result, however, was any mention of the turn that the department took during the last two decades of the twentieth century. There is no extant account of any overt animus in the department toward the history of economic thought or economic history, but the department during those decades became something completely different from the one in which he had been educated or to which he had returned in 1975. Inevitably, when the new Department of Economics was formed out of the old Department of Political Economy in 1982, it would become something different; but rather than looking to its own history of distinction and developing its comparative advantage, the department followed the emerging norm in America.11Despite the presence in the department of several outstanding economic historians and some of the best historians of economic thought in the world, the department pursued the same effort made by every other top economics department in North America, standardizing its graduate education rather than developing its strength in economic history. The doctoral program in economic history became indistinguishable from the doctoral program in economics; this was driven largely by the abandonment of a separate curricular core in economic history for a shared core of economic theory and econometrics courses with the doctoral program in economics. The signature yearlong course requirement in economic history or history of thought was discontinued. For all practical purposes, economic history became a field within economics, rather than its own discipline.12Thus, despite holding an international reputation, and perhaps being the most recognizable name on the department's faculty to those outside Canada, Moggridge's work became less and less integrated in the work of the department. The department that he had been educated in, and to which he had returned in 1975, was unrecognizable by the turn of the millennium.13The excellence of his work as an editor, however, caused an offer of other editorial work to come to him. After Lionel Robbins died in 1984, his family wanted his diaries from three wartime missions to North America to be published and approached James Meade for suggestions. When Meade met Susan Howson at a reception at the LSE in March 1985, he asked her whether Moggridge might be interested in editing the diaries for publication; her positive response led the Robbins family to inquire directly with Moggridge, and he replied that he and Howson could do the work together. Meade also had a wartime diary from a 1943 North American mission that had included Robbins but for which Robbins had not kept a diary; Meade had the idea that the four diaries together would form a compelling documentary record. Ultimately, this led to The Wartime Diaries of Lionel Robbins and James Meade (Howson and Moggridge 1990b).Moggridge had already considered the possibility of editing both Meade's 1943 diary and a longer one covering two years (1944–46) of his government service before the opportunity to edit Robbins's diaries arose. Hence when Meade asked Howson to edit his collected academic papers in July 1985, it was obvious to ask the publishers to publish The Cabinet Office Diary (Howson and Moggridge 1990a) as a fourth volume.Thus, not all of Moggridge's editing work after completing his editorial responsibilities on Keynes's Collected Writings came as invitations. In addition to his original idea to publish Meade's diaries, he had the idea while he was wrapping up his “big” biography of Keynes to edit Dennis Robertson's correspondence.14 “During my life with Keynes, I had often had intellectual and literary dealings with Robertson,” and so he realized the value of filling in this part of the intellectual history of twentieth-century economics (Moggridge 1997: 44).Eventually, much of his editing and writing was completed at the so-called History of Economics Factory, the house he shared in Cambridge after 1989 with his partner, Susan Howson. He regularly spent his leaves and his summers in Cambridge after returning to Canada in 1975, and it served as a second home, keeping him deeply rooted in Cambridge.Late in his career, Moggridge also produced an excellent, exhaustive biography of the great twentieth-century economist Harry Johnson (2008).15 Moggridge had worked with Johnson's wife, Elizabeth, who had been his Joint Editor when he began work on the Keynes papers in 1969, and he knew Harry. Moggridge shared many things with Johnson, including growing up in Ontario, being an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, and doing graduate work at Cambridge. Moggridge was also in the similar position to Johnson of having started his academic career at Cambridge and so, perhaps, appreciated the many dimensions of Johnson's decision to walk away from Cambridge and risk building a career elsewhere. But if it is not surprising that Moggridge understood the biographical details of Harry's professional life, what is perhaps unexpected in the biography is Moggridge's working knowledge of the nuanced twists and turns of Johnson's work as an international trade theorist. Few twentieth-century economists have been so well served by their biographers.Few historians of economic thought gain the wide respect that Moggridge enjoyed among his peers. He served as the President of the History of Economics Society in 1988–89, hosting a highly successful annual conference at the University of Toronto in June 1988. From 1998 to 2018, he served as the Book Review Editor of this journal. In 2008, he was named a Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society, its highest accolade.The one enduring mystery of his career is why he never became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, for his achievements were matched by few in Canadian letters. Characteristically, Moggridge himself was not concerned with the apparent slight.Historians of economic thought are a small, largely loyal tribe. During the last fifty years, when the modern institutions of the discipline (societies, journals, archives, and research fellowships) were formed, the preanalytic vision, or point of view, of the historian has ultimately been much less important than the quality of the histories they wrote. In this golden age, Moggridge was a leading light, generous to all and always exercising his extraordinary judgment quietly, clearly, and effectively.Many people gave generously of their time to talk with me as I prepared this obituary: Loren Brandt, Anna Carabelli, Jon Cohen, Patrick Deutscher, Hugh Grant, Susan Howson, Kris Inwood, David Laidler, Kathy Moggridge, and Sandra Peart. Susan Howson read earlier drafts of the obituary and saved me from many errors. Roger Backhouse also gave me valuable advice after reading an earlier draft. All remaining errors are mine alone.