A war that finance didn’t wantEnglish T IS a common place in left-wing circles that wars are started to satisfy capitalist interests; arms manufacturers and the like. Thus the Socialist Party of Great Britain declared that What was responsible for these wars was the whole world system of capitalism with its competitive struggle for profits and its collection of competing armed states. But the war was a disaster for investors, with stock exchanges closed and trade disrupted, while inflation and repudiation wiped out holders of government debt. Before the war, the writer Norman Angell had suggested in his book “The Great Illusion” that the commercial links between the great powers were so close that war would be a disastrous option. He was ignored; to the politicians in charge of pre-1914 states, many of whom were aristocratic and thus distinctly snobby about “trade”, terms like “honour” and “glory” were more important.