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Scholarly interest in the interwar debate on the origins of the Great War has focused on the role played by historians and decision-makers, which eventually settled into a revisionist consensus stressing collective responsibility. This article reexamines the role played by British journalists in the early political debate on the origins of the war, recapturing the interpretations of journalists, editors, and political commentators after World War I. Through postwar memoirs, books centered on the origins of the war, essays, and other writings, many of the most prominent British journalists focused on making the case for German war guilt after 1914. In doing so, they mostly worked to support the official judgment of the Versailles Peace Treaty against revisionist historians and opinion in Britain and abroad. The interpretation developed by British journalists in this period thus served as a direct counterfoil to the revisionist consensus of this period and continues to resonate even up to the present day among those who see World War I as Britain's "good war."

Together with the two treaties of Paris – concluded in May 1814 and November 1815 respectively – the Congress of Vienna framed the general peace settlement that ended the long period of international conflict stemming from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The international conference met from October 1814 until June 1815 and was presided over by the most important statesmen of the age representing the four victorious Great Powers as well as France. It decided the major outlines of the postwar territorial settlement in central and eastern Europe, ensuring Prussia, Russia, and Austria annexed new territories and populations as compensation for their part in the wars, while Britain primarily gained new colonial territories outside of the Continent. The gathering is often viewed as a long‐term success, in that it balanced the interests of the Great Powers and created lasting mechanisms to preserve peace up through the middle of the nineteenth century.