Sir Ralph Norman Angell (26 December 1872 – 7 October 1967) was an English Nobel Peace Prize winner.

[2][3] Angell is most remembered for his 1910 book The Great Illusion, the thesis of which is that the economic integration of the European countries had grown to such a degree that war between them would be entirely futile, making militarism obsolete.

Then, still only 17, he emigrated to the West Coast of the United States,[3] where for several years he worked as a vine planter, an irrigation-ditch digger, a cowboy, a California homesteader (after filing for American citizenship), a mail carrier, a prospector,[6] and then, closer to his natural skills, as a reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and later the San Francisco Chronicle.

[3] Due to family matters he returned to England briefly in 1898, then moved to Paris to work as a sub-editor of the English-language Daily Messenger[6] and then as a staff contributor to the newspaper Éclair.

He went to the United States in 1940 to lecture in favour of American support for Britain in World War II, and remained there until after the publication of his autobiography in 1951.

The book's thesis is that the economic integration of the European countries had grown to such a degree that war between them would be entirely futile, making militarism obsolete.

If credit and commercial contract are tampered with in an attempt at confiscation, the credit-dependent wealth is undermined, and its collapse involves that of the conqueror; so that if conquest is not to be self-injurious it must respect the enemy’s property, in which case it becomes economically futile.

When Germany annexed Alsace, no individual German secured a single mark’s worth of Alsatian property as the spoils of war.

[13] Angell's book The Press and the Organisation of Society is cited as a source in F. R. Leavis' pamphlet Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930).