ABSTRACT
Angell, whose name was Ralph Norman Angell-Lane was a particularly astute intellectual with exceptional communication skills. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933, and became a Labour MP and adviser to Woodrow Wilson. He is best known as the author of The Great Illusion, a book that has been revised, reprinted and translated numerous times since 1909. The relationship between the economic prosperity of a nation and its military power was illusory, according to Angell, because in an integrated economic and financial system, the destruction of one side's productive resources would lead to a proportional loss for all the other sides. The consequence of the conflicts was that each state tended to strengthen its military arsenal in order to escape the rival armies. The Anglo-French pact of 1860 that reduced tariffs between the two countries and was followed by similar agreements between Britain and several other European countries, attempted to bring into being something like a common market.
