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Strictly, the "Cambridge Keynesians" is a loose term used to refer to the unique group of British economists inspired by John Maynard Keynes's General Theory in a more "fundamentalist" way than the American Neo-Keynesians.
Their origin stems from the inner circle, the five members of Keynes's "Circus" at Cambridge -- Joan Robinson, Richard Kahn, Piero Sraffa, Austin Robinson and James Meade -- got together to read Keynes's Treatise soon after it appeared in 1930 and thereafter commented on the successive drafts of the General Theory before it was published.
Forming a more distant ring, but in many ways no less important for the later development of Keynesian economics, were contemporary young economists in England at the time, such as Roy F. Harrod at Oxford and Nicholas Kaldor, Abba Lerner and John Hicks at the L.S.E. -- who were the first to digest and expand upon Keynes's work, becoming its thereby the flag-carriers outside of Cambridge proper.
Up until about 1960, the "Cambridge" research programme followed largely the path initiated by Roy F. Harrod, effectively to explore the implications of Keynes's theory for long-run growth and endogenous cyclical fluctuations. This may be considered the the "Oxbridge phase" of the Cambridge Keynesians.
In the course of this research effort, several of the Cambridge Keynesians, particularly Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor, began reorienting themselves more distinctly and inching towards an integration of Keynes's theory and Classical political economy. To a good extent, this move was inspired by the work of Michal Kalecki, who seemed to have been able to marry Marxian and Keynesian analysis in his (independent) work on macrofluctuations.
Perhaps the greatest impetus was the eminence grise of Cambridge -- Piero Sraffa -- who virtually single-handed resurrection of the Ricardian theory of value theory in his Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960). Although it followed upon Joan Robinson's original queries about capital aggregation (1954, 1956), Sraffa's "capital critique" set the radical "counter-revolutionary" tone of the Cambridge Capital Controversy that ensued with the American Neo-Keynesians.
The Robinson-Kaldor growth theory and the Cambridge Capital Controversy galvanized a new generation of "Cambridge Keynesians" -- such as Luigi Pasinetti, Piero Garegnani, John Eatwell, Geoff Harcourt -- to initiate the "Neo-Ricardian" research program, an attempt at an explicit marriage of Keynesian theory of effective demand and the Ricardian theory of value. In the course of their confrontation with Neo-Keynesian Synthesis, the Cambridge Keynesians found sympathizers in the American Post Keynesian school.
Thus, in summary, the "Cambridge" approach combines some part of three strands of work: that of the original "macroeconomic" vision of John Maynard Keynes, the "distributional" emphasis of Michal Kalecki and the "value theory" of Piero Sraffa - all three strands of which were perhaps personified in most clearly in the dynamic duo, Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor, and carried on today by the Neo-Ricardian and Post Keynesian schools.
The Founder
The Five Members of Keynes's "Circus"
Associates of the Circus Generation
The Next Generation (see also the Neo-Ricardians and the Post Keynesians)
Post-War Cambridge "Neoclassicals"
Resources on the Cambridge Keynesians