This book makes an original contribution to international relations and British politics. It identifies for the first time the dominant pre-modern theory of international relations, which fatalistically assumed that war was beyond human control. It then shows how this theory was undermined from the 1730s onwards, with the consequence that a debate began about how best to prevent war in which a vocal minority argued that war as an institution for settling disputes could be abolished. Britain led the way in this repudiation of fatalism and exploration of pacific alternatives: it produced the...

Covering all significant peace associations and campaigns, this work is the first comprehensive and authoritative study of Great Britain's efforts to not merely prevent war but to abolish it. It is based on an extensive use of archival as well as printed sources, making it relevant both to historians of nineteenth and twentieth century British politics and to specialists in international relations interested in the anti-realist tradition.

Sir Norman Angell, pioneer both of international relations as a distinct discipline and of the theory of globalization, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and one of the twentieth century's leading internationalist campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic, lived the great illusion in three senses. First, his 'life job', as he came to call it, was founded upon and defined by The Great Illusion, a best-seller whose original version appeared in 1909: it perceptively showed how economic interdependence would prevent great powers profiting from war; yet it made other, less felicitous, claims from...