In the late summer of 1926 William Ralph Inge, sometime Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, long-standing Dean of St Paul's cathedral and recent recruit to the staff of the London Evening Standard, published a new book. It was his seventh in as many years. Unlike much of this prolific churchman's previous literary output, England had been specially commissioned as part of a major series. That multi-volume project, prestigiously edited by the Rt Hon. H. A. L. Fisher, Warden of New College, Oxford, was portentously dedicated to the analysis of ‘Historical Forces in the Modern World’. It was conceived as a collection of discrete studies comprehending all the significant ancient, modern and putative nations. The announced aim of so much coordinated effort was to furnish intelligent lay readers with a truly

But its underlying purpose pointed to nothing less than the pursuit of world peace. By that, Fisher and his associates meant Pax Britannica tempered by the League of Nations. The Warden fervently believed that a hitherto elusive goal might be achieved through enhanced mutual understanding, at least insofar as the best and the brightest in the anglophone world then conceived of that state. Inge's offering was one of the first volumes to appear, followed shortly after complementary accounts of Germany by G. P. Gooch, and Turkey by Arnold Toynbee.