Norman Angell

Born Ralph Norman Angell Lane in Holbeach, Lincolnshire, he worked as a journalist and writer and built an international reputation through his book The Great Illusion (1910). In it, he argued that war no longer brought real economic benefit, even to the winning side, because modern nations had become too financially and socially interconnected.

That argument made him a major public intellectual in the years before and after the First World War. He wrote widely on politics, economics, and international affairs, and his work was translated into many languages and debated across Europe and the United States.

Angell was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1933 in recognition of his writing and long-standing efforts to promote international understanding. Today he is remembered as a clear, forceful critic of militarism whose central question still feels strikingly modern: what do nations truly gain from war?