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Sir Ralph Norman Angell (26 December 1872 – 7 October 1967) was a lecturer, journalist, author and Member of Parliament National Archives for the Labour Party. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to promote peace, particular through writings that argued that modern economic interdependence made war irrational and self-defeating.
Angell was one of the principal founders of the Union of Democratic Control. He served on the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, was an executive for the World Committee against War and Fascism, a member of the executive committee of the League of Nations Union, and the president of the Abyssinia Association. He was made a Knight Bachelor in 1931 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933. Angell biography, nobelprize.org; retrieved 11 September 2015.
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. Angell was frequently misunderstood at the time, and afterward, as claiming that a general European war was impossible. Because of this widespread misunderstanding, the advent of World War I exposed Angell to scholarly and popular derision.
In Geneva, Angell felt that Europe was "hopelessly entangled in insoluble problems". Then, still only 17, he emigrated to the West Coast of the United States, where for several years he worked as a vine planter, an irrigation-ditch digger, a cowboy, a California Homestead Act (after filing for American citizenship), a mail carrier, a Prospecting, and then, closer to his natural skills, as a reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and later the San Francisco Chronicle.
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 and then as a staff contributor to the newspaper Éclair. Also during this period he acted as French correspondent for some American newspapers, to which he sent dispatches on the progress of the Dreyfus affair. During 1905–12, he became the Paris editor for the Daily Mail.
He returned to England and, in 1914, co-founded the Union of Democratic Control. He joined the Labour Party in 1920 and was parliamentary candidate for Rushcliffe in the general election of 1922 and for Rossendale in 1923. He was MP for Bradford North from 1929 to 1931; after the formation of the National Government, he announced his decision not to seek reelection on 24 September 1931. The Times, 25 September 1931, p. 6. In 1931 he was Knight Bachelor for his public and political services, and in 1933 he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He stood unsuccessfully for the London University seat in 1935.
From the mid-1930s, Angell actively campaigned for collective international opposition to the aggressive policies of Germany, Italy, and Japan. 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. He later returned to Britain and died at the age of 94 in Croydon, Surrey.
He married Beatrice Cuvellier, but they separated and he lived his last 55 years alone. He purchased Northey Island, Essex, which is attached to the mainland only at low tide, and lived in the island's sole dwelling.
Angell's Nobel Prize medal was sold at auction at Sotheby's, London, in 1983 for £8,000 (), being bought by his nephew, Eric Angell Lane. The medal, with its accompanying scroll, is now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum.
During World War I, British historian and polemicist G. G. Coulton authored a purported refutation of Angell's pamphlet. Coulton, G.G., The Main Illusions of Pacifism: A Criticism of Mr. Norman Angell and of the Union of Democratic Control, (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1916) (retrieved November 25, 2022).
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