The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War

by Nicholas Mulder

The first international history of the emergence of economic sanctions during the interwar period and the legacy of this development



Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are modeled on devastating techniques of warfare.



Tracing the use of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder uses extensive archival research in a political, economic, legal, and military history that reveals how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations. This timely study casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their unintended consequences are so tremendous.

Genres: Economics, History, Politics, Nonfiction, War, International Relations, Political Science

448 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 25, 2022

Reviews

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel like Nicholas Mulder's book 'The Economic Weapon. The Rise of Sanctions as Tool of Modern War' (Yale University Press, 2022) is the definite account of the 20th century history of sanctions and economic warfare. Not that I have read particularly widely on the subject but it felt comprehensive :-)

The book came out in February or March this year which is obviously too timely. It took me nearly two months to get through this dense work as I was too busy enjoying yet another endless Damascene summer so I have probably forgotten some things by now.

Personal side note: Without going into too much detail (...), I believe I started to really understand what sanctions - the slow economic suffocating - can do to a country and its people. I know, I know there are always many factors at play and it's difficult to attribute causality (when there is also corruption, war, and other crises) but, at the end of the day, sanctions remain a brutal tool of warfare against civilians, especially the economically most marginalized. I also know the argument of 'targeted sanctions' , it's a bit like with those famous 'precision airstrikes'. Sometimes I feel people in the west understand so little about war and poverty that they'll support any horror draped in technocratic language (think also: defensive weapons, structural adjustment, the list is really endless).

Anyway, given that I have never really engaged with the history of sanctions, I had so many epiphanies while reading and brought up the book at pretty much every single conversation over the past two months and promised to lend the book to at least a dozen people :)

Anyway, below are a few take-aways:

#1 - Some statistics that surprised me: In WW I, 300,000- 400,000 people died of blockade (against the Central Powers) induced starvation and illness in Central Europe, with an additional 500,000 deaths in the Ottoman provinces of the middle east affected by the Anglo-French blockade. Before WW II, these hundreds of thousands of deaths by economic isolation were the chief man-made cause of civilian deaths in 20th century conflict.

#2 - What didn’t surprise me at all is the colonial origin of sanctions and that the newly introduced (1919) League of Nations Sanctions were considered suitable for use mainly against peripheral European states and 'semi-civilize countries'. "Justifying the infliction of pain from a distance came easily to European elites accustomed to managing colonial empires overseas and defending class rule at home". Just as modern drone warfare, sanctions are primarily a means to punish unfriendly regimes (aka its people) and/or aggressors in far-away places at minimal human cost to the punishing power.

#3 - Initially, sanctions, as a legitimate tool of international law (first through the League of Nations, then after WWII the UN), were developed to defend liberal internationalism and hoped to prevent war through deterrence (as a peacekeeping tool of sorts). As we can see from the relative nonsuccess of sanctions, this would presuppose states as 'rational actors'; i.e. forgoing war and territorial conquest given the costs associated with sanctions that would be imposed as a result of aggression. Quite the contrary, Mulder shows or suggest how sanctions may have actually backfired in the run-up to WW II. Specifically, the book shows how sanctions against Mussolini’s Italy in the wake of its invasion of Ethiopia and Hitler’s Germany during its accelerating territorial conquests on the European continent may have actually fueled aggressive territorial expansion and autarky rather than curtail it. Think of Nazi Germany's defensive autarky aimed to develop blockade resistance ("Blockadefestigkeit") through increased domestic resource production, solidification of relations with Central and East European countries, and expansions into resource-rich territory including support for Franco’s Spanish Nationalists in 1936, as well as the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. I found this to be the most interesting chapter, actually,

#4 - Sanctions have then evolved from their original external purpose of halting inter-state war and preserving territorial order to the modern-day unilateral and multilateral tools to pursue internal goals (democratization, human rights you name it) - also designed and 'fine-tuned' by a cadre of technocrats and experts and often without consideration of their unintended consequences to civilians, and of course these days primarily driven by the financial system given that the west no longer holds a monopoly on resources but does so over the USD and Wallstreet and City of London. Etc. Actually, it's not true that the impact on civilians is an unintended effect overlooked by the generals are their desks in D.C. or elsewhere: the explicit hope of sanctions is that they would eventually immiserate people to a point where they will rise up against their dictators. The cruelty of this logic is beyond imagination.

#5 - Interestingly, with the end of the cold war, sanctions use doubled in the 1990s and 2000s compared to the period 1950-1985 and by the 2010s doubled again. According to the book (citing the UN), in 2015, 1/3 of the world's population lives in countries that are under some form of economic sanctions! While their use is expanding to deal with all sorts of adversaries and regimes, there is very little evidence of sanctions' effectiveness (the book offers an estate of '20 per cent' success but I have no idea how that would have been quantified) and most likely even less so in the 21st century. From the beginning, one of the problems associated with economic isolation was that of neutral states and the current new cold war shows that it is pretty much impossible to effectively isolate any of the west's great rivals, good luck trying that with China next. In this context, I also found it interesting how 'aid' or 'positive sanctions' was always part of sanctions, i.e., providing material aid to countries who did not support adversaries, etc., the whole while link between sanctions and humanitarianism is very illuminating.

#6 - I think the last sentence of the book sums it up quite accurately "The economic weapon may be a form of politics by other means. But ultimately, stitching animosity into the fabric of international affairs and human exchange is of limited use in changing the world".

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

The publishers did a bit of a sneaky thing, not slapping the dates covered by this history on the front. To get it out of the way early: it's 1914-1945. So when it says this is about 'the rise of sanctions as a tool of modern war', read this as the 'toothing' era of sanctions, popping up slowly, painfully from the gums of interwar Great Power relations. As Mulder writes in the 7 page conclusion of this book - which pretty much alone says anything at all about the present - it wasn't until after 1945 that the use of sanctions really 'settled' into a normalized tool of international (non?-)relations. The Economic Weapon then, is precisely about the growing pains of this tool: the hopes pinned upon it, the fears engendered by it, and the miseries dispensed through it.

For it's clear that the utter novelty of the economic weapon - as something almost thrown together, ad hoc, as the first world war trudged towards its end - left states recalibrating everything they knew about statecraft. What would it mean for an entire economy to be shut out of global circuits of exchange, just when those circuits were themselves blooming like never before? Could 'peace' remain 'peace', if, in the absence of bullets and bayonets, entire populations withered on the vine? And what of the other side of the economic weapon - not just sanctions, but aid, mass economic sustenance, which, as Mulder makes everywhere clear in this book, was almost never thought of apart from sanctions: to think the 'positive' weapon of aid along with the 'negative' weapon of denial - these were the shiny new instruments of global statecraft, now in the hands of old powers with only provisional licenses.

As a history, The Economic Weapon is one of logistical hydraulics: the story of flows squeezed or accelerated, systems of circulation (goods and finance) interrupted or redirected. To take one of Mulder's centerpiece examples: if Germany in WW1 required manganese to strengthen their steel for war, and if the Allies controlled almost all the deposits of manganese, well, it made sense that Germany would make their way down to the Georgian mines in 1918 to relieve its materiel suffocation. Anti-flow, counter-flow. All this and more mapped out across 30 years of high-wire pressure and release, with Mulder as sensitive and detailed barometer. Not only then, a history of sanctions, but perhaps even more interestingly, a history of the interwar period as told through the aperture of sanctions and their political vicissitudes.

As for the take-aways, there are a few, but perhaps the most intriguing is Mulder's reassessment of the effectiveness of the economic weapon. While the League of Nations - maybe the central character in the story told here - often cops flak for its historical toothlessness, Mulder convincingly shows that even the very threat of sanctions deeply shaped the course of interwar history. Hanging like a sword of Damocles, sanction-phobia even played a role in spurring, rather than averting, Axis military aggression, so fearful were they of the potential consequences of economic deprivation. Effectiveness then, albeit not exactly the kind intended (at least not all the time). There's more of course, although Mulder tends to stick pretty closely to the history, with only a few select but decisive moments of adjudication. A little dry perhaps, but excellent.

[Hadrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sanctions are often thought of as a modern political tool or an alternative to war, with the United States being their primary user since the 1990s. This volume traces the history of the use of sanctions in time and their parallel to the use of blockade in wartime from the First World War to 1945.

When war broke out in Europe in 1914, the British Empire had instituted a naval blockade against the German Empire - it alone had the navy to do so. But even that was imperfect, as Dutch neutrality meant that blocking all the ports was impractical, and the Swiss principle of neutrality meant that not all transactions were stopped. By 1916, however, British and French banks were threatening exclusion from the global financial system with those banks that were not compliant; the Dutch, Swiss, and other Scandinavian banks complied. The blockade regime grew only stronger when the United States joined in after the war.

The "economic weapon" was potent but not decisive; Germany and Austria-Hungary had lean winters and may have collapsed entirely were it not for Romanian harvests. For the Ottoman Empire, it was much worse. With the benefit of hindsight, the effect of sanctions in contention. But in the years after the war and the victory of the Allies over the Entente, the belief that the blockade was a primary cause of victory led to further implementations of its use. As a result of these beliefs, the right to sanction was written into Article 16 of the League of Nations:

Should any Member of the League resort to war in disregard of its covenants under Articles 12, 13 or 15, it shall ipso facto be deemed to have committed an act of war against all other Members of the League, which hereby undertake immediately to subject it to the severance of all trade or financial relations, the prohibition of all intercourse between their nationals and the nationals of the covenant-breaking State, and the prevention of all financial, commercial or personal intercourse between the nationals of the covenant-breaking State and the nationals of any other State, whether a Member of the League or not.

Mulder then details the use of sanctions in the interwar years - as a response to international tensions, and in preserving the post-war order, but perhaps not the only tool. The threat alone of sanctions had some deterrent effect, particularly in the Balkans. But while the threat alone was enough against smaller nations, it took another step to take place in Great Power politics.

After the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the League responded with a comprehensive package of sanctions that was called "the greatest experiment in history". Nearly all members of the League of Nations had signed up for an import and export ban, to drive Italy of the resources and hard currency to carry out the war. It might have done more, if it had included an oil embargo and the United States had participated. The United States was not a member of the League of Nations, and President Hoover had doubts about subordinating business to foreign affairs. Even with that taken into account: if the Italian campaign had bogged down further in the summer, then the sanctions might have brought Italy and the war to a grinding halt. The Italians advanced more quickly than expected after the use of chemical weapons against the Ethiopians and conducting aerial raids against civilian populations.

Mussolini knew that if oil was blockaded, the sanctions would be suffocating. In the "perverse logic of self-sufficiency", the threat of sanctions drove these regimes - Germany, Italy, and Japan - to seek economic autarky, to become self-reliant in the war industry and to move more quickly. In a telling phrase, Hitler told a Swiss diplomat that "I need Ukraine, so they cannot starve us out like in the last war." A few months later, he had signed a deal with the Soviet Union for trade and resources and the cruel division of Eastern Europe between them.

After reading all that, it is tempting to make comparisons between the historical cases and the current situation. But to make an exact comparison is not entirely possible, and misses so many variables that I cannot possibly list here. Where in the League of Nations, the United States was absent, in the modern cases, and especially in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is the linchpin of the current sanctions regime. Where oil was excluded in the case of sanctions against Italy, the United States has already banned the import of oil, liquid natural gas, and coal from Russia. Finally, Mulder concludes with the discussion of the "positive economic weapon" of aid and supplies given as a reinforcement to allies or other states. Mulder has already been interviewed elsewhere about the risks of sanctions and the possibility of "blowback" - he suggests that the sanctioning of specific oligarchs and financial institutions would be effective. The sanction is no perfect weapon -- none exist, there will always be collateral damage -- but the points he raises would inform any historical argument or policy discussion.

[Cold · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given how unbelievably relevant and important the topic is, the book was a bit meh. The author knows a lot about pre-1930s sanctions but struggles to link the lessons to wider history of sanctions, let alone the present. Even so, there are many interesting and relevant lessons about sanctions discipline and the potential for countries to defect for business reasons. Many of which are playing out in the news as we speak.

[Austin Barselau · Rating 4 out of 5]

In “The Economic Weapon,” Nicholas Mulder illuminates the genesis of diplomatic sanctions during the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s through the second world war, as well as the tortuous erection of a liberal world order which gave those sanctions significance. Mulder, an assistant professor of modern European history at Cornell University, argues that the modern conception of sanctions – which seeks to remediate the internal ambitions or conditions of a country (e.g., “to address human rights violations, convince dictatorships to give way to democracy, smother nuclear programs, punish criminals, press for the release of political prisoners, or obtain other concessions”) – has evolved from its original external purpose of halting interstate war and preserving territorial order. Mulder posits that sanctions have become a creeping form of statecraft by other means, enacted by a thicket of detached technocrats and experts and often without due consideration of their unintended consequences. Many of these consequences, such as the concomitant rise of nationalism and autarky in the post-Versailles era as nations hostile reacted to their exclusion from global commerce, have contributed to what the author calls sanctions’ “history of disappointment.” Sanctions, now an overused instrument of diplomatic and economic coercion, have largely been rendered inefficacious by their limited potential to enact pressure in absence of total war.

Mulder traces the history of sanctions, first in its prototype as commercial blockades (the “permanent potentiality” that could be used even in peacetime) and then increasingly as a financial instrument of excluding wayward nations from the global trading system. This “new form of liberalism,” he writes, expanded the scope of conflict, and did not necessarily require the large deployment of troops or manufacture of armaments. Rather, it now could be mobilized by “a technical and administrative apparatus of lawyers, diplomats, military experts, and economists” from their own desks. For the first time in history, civilian bureaucrats could control matters of international statecraft. The triumph of the Foreign Office over the Admiralty, writes Mulder, became a new, and potentially destabilizing, method of exclusionary warfare. In doing so, sanctionists broached a new form of politics that blurred distinctions between soldiers and citizens, state and private property, and hostile and neutral nations under the banner of preserving territorial order and spurring democratization.

While economic provocations were used successfully against Yugoslavia in 1921 and Greece in 1925, Mulder exposes their limited reach, as well as how they may have backfired in the run up to World War II. Sanctions against Mussolini’s Italy in the wake of its invasion of Ethiopia and Hitler’s Germany during its accelerating territorial conquests on the European continent, as well as resource embargos against Japan, may have only fueled aggressive territorial expansion and autarky rather than curtail it. For example, sanctions were unable to prevent Italy from following through on its war in Africa, largely through its own successful national resistance campaign of stockpiling, national saving, and metal collection drives that were motivated by Mussolini’s call to bind the country into a “fortress of resistance” against the overbearing Allied powers. Mussolini was able to sublimate this campaign of resistance into a policy of autarchia – an anti-sanctions endeavor to achieve resource independence, which led to adventures to secure iron ore from Spain and oil from Albania. Likewise, Germany’s “defensive autarky” aimed to develop blockade resistance (Blockadefestigkeit) through increased domestic resource production, solidification of relations with Central and East European countries, and expansions into resource-rich territory including support for Franco’s Spanish Nationalists in 1936, as well as the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939, respectively. U.S. oil and metal embargoes on Japan also increased its ambition for an “autarkic East Asian economic zone based on a yen block covering Japan, Manchukuo, Korea, north China, and Taiwan,” only to be thwarted by sustained conflict with Chiang’s Nationalist forces on the Asian continent.

While describing the history of sanctions as a largely one of disappointment, Mulder also calls attention to the “stabilizing power of provision” that was first sorely missed during the interwar period under the post-Versailles League of Nations era. Such coordination was more successful at building alliances and planting the seeds of a postwar international order that generated peace and productivity. Mulder points to the U.S.’ Lend-Lease agreement, which provided weapons and materials to nations withstanding Axis invasion, as “the most significant economic scheme against aggression ever created.” Such positive economic mobilization, he argues, was the salve to the chronic ill that plagued the ineffectual and ill-fated League. Mulder’s examination and assessment of this history is clear: positive aid provision, rather than destabilizing resource deprivation, is most integral to the health of liberal internationalism and the containment of hostile actors.
While Mulder criticizes sanctions applied in the interwar context, his book does not examine the efficacy of more recent examples of sanctioning. While many scholars agree that leveraging sanctions and embargos on adversaries has been unfruitful (e.g., in the case of North Korean and Iranian nuclearization, Cuba’s communist rule, Russia’s territorial adventurism and domestic repression, Venezuela’s totalitarianism), there are limited cases where sanctions have worked where the subject is dependent on positive relations with the sanction applier. For example, the threat of sanctions convinced the Dutch to agree to Indonesian independence in 1949, Britain to deescalate from the Suez Crisis in 1957, and South Korea and Taiwan to abandon their nuclear programs in 1975 and 1976. In each of these contexts, sanctions threatened to exclude target countries from vital channels of support and induced them to change course. Sanctions may have limited range, and thus work only in specific circumstances, but their efficacy appears to be largely contingent on the context of relations between the applier and target countries.

Despite these caveats, Mulder does a superb job illuminating how sanctions can fray the fabric work of international stability, rather than actively working to promote its preservation.

[Jonathan F · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nicholas Mulder's The Economic Weapon is well-timed, its release coinciding with the war in Ukraine and the imposition of severe economic sanctions on Russia. Its primary lesson suggests that economic sanctions are more likely to accelerate devolution to world war than to impede it. The book focuses on the evolution of sanctions from another tool of total war to a lever the Anglo-French powers thought they could pull to avoid total war, between 1914 and 1945.

The book has a lot of good information in it. There is definitely a lot of value, especially in its look at sanctions in the inter-war and how their success differed on the nature of target. Where sanctions were more likely to work against weak states, like Hungary, Yugoslavia, or Greece, they were unlikely to work against powers like Italy, Germany, and Japan. In fact, by cutting these powers off sources of financing and from strategic raw resources, economic sanctions tended to accelerate their path towards imperialism because territorial expansion was the only strategy to acquire new financial means and needed strategic resources.

One interesting case is that of Japan, which was ultimately sanctioned by the United States, Great Britain, and the Dutch. Without being able to procure oil, steel, and other resources on the open market, Japan embarked on what they knew was a losing war against the United States. The trade-off was to acquire oil-producing Indonesia.

Why would a country that knows its odds for success are low start the war? Because the "off-ramp" to sanctions offered by the sanctioning states is humiliating. They require the aggressor to backtrack and meet the demands of the sanctioners. Strong, proud states are unlikely to do that, so the only other option is to be more aggressive in order to survive the sanctions.

It is unfortunate that the book stops at 1945. In the final chapter, Mulder does survey some of the literature on post-war sanctions. While evidence suggests that economic sanctions work in 30 to 40% of cases, the same evidence shows that the likelihood of success has actually been decreasing since the 1990s, so that today the likelihood of success is around 20 to 25%. Still, as Mulder points out, economies have changed quite a bit since the 1940s. We are more hyper-financialized than ever, we produce more intangible goods than ever, and trade flows are dictated by capital flows rather than the other way around.* As such, the nature of sanctions has also changed quite a bit.

I suspect that a more comprehensive and sweeping account of economic sanctions in modern history will be published. As I mentioned, Mulder's focus is relatively narrow: 1914 to 1945. Furthermore, the writing is very academic and the book is, frankly, not written as if meant for a wide audience. My main criticism is that the book lacks soul — it's very distant on the humans affected by sanctions, apart from high-level statistics. If you're looking for an interesting read that's comprehensive, but all the same tractable and enjoyable, this is probably not your book.

If you're looking for information and could care less about how the book reads, then I think you'll find The Economic Weapon to be informative.


* See Klein and Pettis (2020), Trade Wars are Class Wars

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sanctions as a tool of statecraft, have long been seen as having great potential to put pressure on errant states, to express opposition to state policies and actions, to bring about change, and to maintain an established order. They are, and have historically, been widely used, especially in times of conflict, to do such things are to prevent trade with hostile states, to economically weaken or socially disrupt enemies, and so forth. However, as Nicholas Mulder argues in this impressive piece of diplomatic history, sanctions as a policy practice and diplomatic tool changed significantly in the early 20th century as a result of coordinated economic action during the First World War.

It is a compelling analysis that demands that we look again at the era and rethink both the tactical and strategic question of sanctions as a policy tool, and reconsider dominant understandings of the potential for and practice of international collective security, especially during the interwar period, 1919-39. The focus is primarily on the League of Nations, its sanctions-allowing infrastructure, and the efforts to use that in the complex and shifting circumstances of international statecraft during the era. Alongside and woven through this institutional history, he also explores the policy and conceptual discussions of the practice of collective security and the possibilities for the sanctions tool. In doing so he highlights several crucial conceptual and philosophical shifts, including whether sanctions could be used outside a state of war, and crucially the extent to which they might be seen as an alternative to war.

This multi-stranded analysis provides for a conceptually and empirically rich exploration of the question, along with Mulder’s call on an extensive array of archives in the USA, UK, Switzerland France, and Germany, giving access to a wide range of source materials from a much wider group of states. There is, as a result however, a strong focus on some the key players of the Great War – France, the UK and Germany – who admittedly remained the core states in many of the sanctions-related events of the subsequent 20 years. Even so, I would have liked to have seen a little more attention to the developments in the Soviet Union, although a late-comer to inter-war collective security, a key force. While Mulder gives a clear sense that French and British mistrust of the Soviets was a factor driving the USSR to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, both the significance of that agreement and the developments around sanctions in the late 1930s mean that this omission seems like a missed opportunity – although it might be that the Russian archives remain difficult to work with.

Throughout the discussion Mulder unpicks the key moments of sanctions action, including where they were threatened, and highlights the very real challenges of collective action in the use of sanctions. Some of those are shown to be moral – sanctions on food supplies affecting civilians, for instance; some economic – which sectors are most affected and at what local cost; some are political – who bears the brunt of those economic costs and where do they fit into political support systems. Alongside these kinds of questions, Mulder also explores the tensions of sanctions focusing on commodities or finances, with considerable exploration for instance of the sanctions targeting Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany in the later 1930s that were directed towards export bans with a view to running down foreign reserves.

One of the most compelling aspects of the analysis is the evidence that in some cases the threat of sanctions was more effective than imposing sanctions, preventing wars in South East Europe in the 1920s and keeping fascist Spain of an active alliance with Germany and Italy in 1939/40. He shows, also compellingly, that the fear of sanctions had a profound effect in the later 1930s, having a significant impact on German, Italian, and Japanese economic and military planning. This allows him to draw two important distinctions. The first is between policies of self-government (relative independence from international multi-lateral responsibilities) and self-reliance (in terms of resources), noting that these are often mistakenly conflated or confused. This distinction is vital in understanding developments in the later 1930s. The second distinction is specifically focused on sanctions, where he distinguishes effect from efficacy, showing convincingly that while effects might have been unclear, efficacy (especially the threat of sanctions) had a profound impact.

Mulder then wraps up his deep dive into this problem of diplomacy by asking why, if we accept the standard view that the League of Nations and its sanctions tool were such failures, did the allied powers in World War 2 and subsequently in the United Nations both work had to perfect the instrument, reading the USA’s Lend-Lease programme through the inter-war development of the notion of positive sanctions – assistance to besieged states – and noting the development of a refined sanctions tool in the UN’s initial establishment? His answer, in part, is to do with refinement, but also to do with the way he sees sanctions not as a discrete policy instrument but as an element of collective security.

Sanctions regimes have changed markedly since the late 1940s, as they have come to be used for a much wider range of reasons and in different contexts. Even so, this is a vitally important text in laying the basis for understanding sanctions as an international coercive policy instrument available to states. Its appeal is likely to be specialist, but for those of us who work on these issues, it is essential.

[Mario · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly wonderful read for anyone who is interested in the history of this aspect of humanity.

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book puts economic sanctions back at the center of international history in the early 20th century. As it shows, the economic blockade of the Central Powers in World War I was the most extensive such effort in world history. With separate ministries under Sir Robert Cecil in Britain and Jacques Seydoux in France, hundreds of civil servants worked with bankers and shippers to compile lists of, especially, German imports, and also to make mathematical guesses of percentage of imports to neutral countries they assumed were being diverted to Germany, after which the allies treated the excess as “contraband.” By some measures, the extensive sanctions caused up to 400,000 civilian deaths in the war.

Yet at the Paris Economic Conference of June 1916, the two main powers promised to continue the blockade of Germany after the war to inhibit its economy, a form of “pacific blockade,” that had been tried briefly in the 19th century and in 1902 against Venezuela. The Allies followed through on their threat, and also applied the blockade to Bela Kun’s Hungarian Communist government and the Soviet Union for up to two years after Versailles. Since Woodrow Wilson objected to an international peacekeeping force, the League of Nations charater relied on its Article 16 economic sanction powers (in three stages) to enforce its new anti-aggression policies (and Wilson thus had to compromise on his previous second of fourteen points about the need for “Freedom of the Seas.") The sanctions became the chief force of people who wanted to avoid war, as American Nicholas Murray Butler put it in the 1932 book, Boycotts and Peace.

Counter to those who say the League's economic sanction power was a paper tiger, this book shows that the threats averted a Yugoslavian takeover of Albania in 1921, and a Greek attack on Bulgaria the next year, and, possibly, the Turkish takeover of Mosul soon after. It was fully implemented by the League against Italy in 1935 for its Ethiopia invasion, but didn’t pinch in time and drove both Italy (with its autarkia) and Germany (with its Blockadefertigkeit) to prepare their economies for independence, and eventually pushed them into conquering more territory. The threat of sanctions after the conquest of Manchuria also pushed Japan into conquest, and obviously the several stages of U.S. sanctions against that nation, starting with aviation fuel and scrap metal in June 1940, and increasing to all oil by June 1941, with the assistance of the British and the Dutch, drove that nation to war soon after.

Sometimes the author veers from pointing out that sanctions were horrible and painful, and at the same time implying they were ineffective and unnecessary. He sometimes blames them for driving the Axis into further expansion, while admitting that wartime sanctions were clearly necessary to stop them in the their conquest, in which case there would be no avoiding them. Were the Axis motivated by the threat of a wartime blockade or a peacetime one? If the former, that still assumes they were ready for revanchist war. Yet on the whole this book should be required reading for those who, like the sanction-suspicious William Foster-Arnold at the time, worried that sanctions would allow governments to impose suffering with the stroke of a pen instead of the thrust of the bayonet, and thus avoid the seeming deadly consequences of their own decision.

[Ginger Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who knew the League of Nations would suddenly become relevant? Yes, really. Because it was during the League era that countries first started hammering out the modern concept of economic sanctions – the kind that are now being imposed forcefully on Russia.

The concept grew out of the blockades imposed on Germany and Austria-Hungary during World War I. And memories of those blockades influenced thinkers on all sides. Britain and France credited the blockades with helping end the war, and believed they had become a powerful tool for averting future conflicts.

Germany and Italy learned from the blockades, too – but came to a different conclusion. Fear of future blockades helped convince both countries (plus Japan) that they needed to conquer territory in order to secure resources and make themselves invulnerable to League-imposed shortages.

The League of Nations is now remembered as a total failure, but its legacy is more complex. League sanctions did manage to stop some smaller conflicts in the Balkans. And the sanctions imposed on Italy after its invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 might actually have worked had they been better crafted and executed.

So what went wrong? One big problem was that the United States refused to join the League. Without the world’s leading economy on board, sanctions were difficult to enforce effectively. But another problem was that Britain and France were still empires. As the author notes, Britain viewed Italy as a "fellow European empire engaged in colonial war." Both Britain and France worried about how sanctions might affect their own imperial possessions. And so the sanctions imposed on Italy were half-hearted and of short duration. But Mussolini himself later admitted that more robust sanctions (especially restrictions on fuel) would have doomed his invasion.

Other problems plagued the League as well. Many influential elites in the West viewed Fascism favorably, trusting Hitler and Mussolini more than Soviet Russia. And gathering the extensive data required to make sanctions effective was a formidable task in those pre-digital days.

Despite the League’s failures, it became clear that sanctions could be a powerful weapon – but one that could drive conflict as well as avert it. Roosevelt’s fuel sanctions on Spain in 1940 dissuaded Franco from formally joining the Axis powers – a significant success since Hitler likely would have seized Gibraltar had Spain joined. But fuel sanctions on Japan led Hideki Tojo to attack Pearl Harbor in a desperate bid to disable the US navy before it could stop Japan from grabbing territory in Southeast Asia.

What’s the takeaway for today? The author of this book is on record as saying that sanctions won’t be enough to stop Putin in Ukraine. But sanctions aren’t the whole story, of course. The military aid going to Ukraine is substantial. Plus, the sanctions themselves are far more stringent than anything the League ever tried. The West is also united against Russia, with the United States taking a leading role. Britain and France no longer have empires to defend. Data gathering is a relatively trivial issue these days. But many countries are still buying oil and gas from Russia, providing it with a major source of income. And Xi Jinping has declared that there are “no limits” on China’s friendship with Putin. So who knows?

[Jeff Greason · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got the book interested in the history of how states have used economic pressure and control of raw materials of tools of statecraft. It does indeed contain lessons on that topic, but is a somewhat more narrowly focused look, primarily at how sanctions and other forms of economic pressure have served as tools of what might be called "internationalist" organizations -- their origins in WW1, their key roles in the successes and failures of the League of Nations, and a briefer look at their use by the U.N. and U.S in the postwar world.

The first two thirds of the book I found rather a slog, because the elements of the author's thesis are laid out and exhaustively documented, before reaching WW2 and seeing the elements of that thesis play out in the events of the day. I'm glad I read it, but I doubt I'll do so again.

[Gabriel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dry historical presentation of countries’ and the League of Nations’ enforcement of and reaction to naval blockades and export control up to 1945, which took me quite a while to get through. The author rarely opines but when he does - and it comes only very late in this book - his views are incisive and persuasive. He does not specifically comment on today’s use of sanctions by OFAC or OFSI, but his limited analyses in this book sufficiently reveal his thoughts when he distinguished efficacy from effects.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative about the origin of sanctions, but when I realized Mulder wouldn't be covering anything past World War II, I lost interest.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent history of blockades and economic sanctions starting in the nineteenth century, but with a focus on the interwar period. Without taking a contemporary perspective, it provides a lot of background for today’s many sanctions that have allowed the U.S. to try to manipulate governments and bring harm to people all over the world without declaring war.

It’s notable how little sanctions are questioned in the U.S. today and how much they were questioned in the past. In fact, after WWI the U.S. was the leading country opposed to economic sanctions. Some groups, on both the left and the right, changed their views of sanctions over time depending on the circumstances. Sanctions have been attacked for being ineffective, ineffectual, and overly harmful. They have also been treated as a war weapon, as an alternative to war, and as a way to prevent war (including by the threat of sanctions).

It is rare that there is any attempt to enumerate the harm that sanctions cause, directly and indirectly. Of course, it is even harder to enumerate the harm from a failure to sanction, from the use of the wrong sanctions, or from the ineffective use of sanctions. In other words, it’s much more complicated than you would guess from the U.S. government or news media.

Of course, there’s too much information in this book, at least for my purposes, but for the most part it’s easy to skim past the TMI sections. Mulder’s writing is clear and well-organized.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Economic weapons are 2: sanction/blockade, and help.

This book covered the origin of economic sanction from the turn of the 20th century, until the Second World War.

1. The great European powers decided who to sanction and help. At first the Allies focused on raw material blockade, like Manganese for the protection of high quality steel against the Axis lowers. However alternatives routes are possible and not all countries will participate, making it useless.
2. It is imperialistic, when the Allies had no qualms sanctioning China, they hesitated to do the same with Italy during the Ethiopian war. They also had no inhibition to threaten Yugoslavia and Greece and were successful.
3. Sanction is easy to implement but caused great suffering to the common people, but was seldom able to cause a regime to collapse.
4. Against other Great powers it is useless and may backfire. Germany decided to make itself self sufficient by attacking other countries. Japan was provoked to attack the Pearl Harbour when America instituted an oil embargo.
5. America was neutral before WW2 but became the most prolific user of sanctions after the war.
6. Economic help to China and Russia against the Axis powers during WW2 definitely helped win the war.

It’s a strange book because it stops right after WW2, with only a passing mention of the whole period after. I expected more.

[Connor O'Brien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Critical read in light of recent + future sanctions/controls on China. Further solidified my pessimistic views on the efficacy of sanctions/economic coercion.

[Ian Partridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating, compelling and very well researched book. The subject material is dry, but the author brings the material to life through the principal actors responsible for the development of the rationale and implementation of sanctions.

The book provided me with a much improved understanding of the evolution and rationale behind sanctions. The author, through detailed examination of events is able to bring a great deal of insight on some aspects if early 29th century conflicts and their resolution.

Fascinating read.

[Stephen Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book looks at the early development of using "the economic weapon", meaning sanctions, as a coercive tool rather than going to war. Prior to WWI, economic sanctions were, in themselves, an act of war. They were part of a country's attempt to subdue a rival/enemy, coupled with action on the battlefield. Mulder looks at how they became an acceptable, an favored alternative, while still maintaining the facade of peace.

The first part of the book looks at WWI and how economic sanctions were used by the allies. Germany used a submarine blockade to try to starve Britain and France, but there was no way Germany could be blockaded physically. The alternative was to make it illegal to do business with Germany, which the British government did. It took a huge bureaucracy to manage it and it ended up having only limited effect. Nevertheless, the British government bragged at how effective sanctions were (helped by German propaganda that blamed the British for shortages) so sanctions seemed an easier way to stop belligerent action. One drawback was that sanctions hurt the population as a whole rather than the military, so it seemed immoral. It was also illegal because sanctions were, as said earlier, an act of war.

In the interwar period, these two worries were overcome. The moral argument lost out because sanctions were relatively painless for those applying them, never risking the lives of its young men. The legal argument lost out by some fancy sophistry that basically redefined war in international law. As a result, sanctions because the preferred weapon of the big powers in the interwar period, especially through the League of Nations. The biggest hitch with this was the United States. It was not a member of the League and generally advocated neutrality and free trade, so it wasn't likely to participate in international sanctions. Because it was such a large economy, it could bust sanctions on its own. For that reason, the UK resisted any mechanism for automatic sanctions because enforcing them could put the league into a war with the United States.

Another problem was that people feared sanctions might work too well. When Japan invaded Manchuria, the United States resisted sanctions because it was feared it would force Japan into a war to gain territory to become self-sufficient, which it basically did. Sanctions worked well enough against Yugoslavia in 1931 but completely failed to stop Italy in 1936. Mussolini thought that by the time sanctions had an effect, he could have achieve "autarky", which means self-sufficiency. He failed at that, but sanctions did not undermine Italy's war effort nearly as much as Mussolini's leadership did. The author notes that one of the reasons that Spain stayed neutral in WWII was the threat of sanctions and knowing that neither Germany nor Italy could help out financially. So sanctions were effective mainly if a country was in a weak position and was willing to limit national ambition.

By the time WWII started up, the United States was using the "economic weapon" in a more "positive" way. Through the Lend-Lease Program, the United States was able to become the "Arsenal of Democracy" and provided equipment and money to countries fighting the Axis. In a preview of the "with us or against us" in the Cold War, the Soviet Union was placed under sanctions in 1939, following the Molotov-Rippentropf Pact and the Winter War, only to receive aid when it was attacked by Germany. Similarly Finland was considered one of the good guys in the Winter War, although no American aid was forthcoming, but were put under sanctions when the allied with the Nazis to regain conquered territory.

The big takeaways from the book are: 1) economic sanctions used to be an act of war but has since become a means to avoid war. 2) Sanctions have inconsistent success. 3) The success of sanctions depends on a lot of factors, some of which seem irrational. 4) The United States has gone from thinking sanctions were "un-American" to being their primary proponent. 5) The more sanctions are used, the less effective they are. It is estimated that 1/3 of the people on the planet are under some form of economic sanction right now, but those sanctions are doing little to change behavior.

This was a shockingly timely book, with the United States pulling out new and terrifying forms of the "economic weapon" to counter Russian aggression. It has sanctioned Russia, which has had little effect on Russia's behavior, and it has provided aid to Ukraine, which has helped Ukraine resist the Russian advances. It gets a little too detailed for me at times, but was still an easy ready and was very interesting.

[André Morais · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 2022, Nicholas Mulder’s “the Economic Weapon” is a timely account of the use of sanctions (at large, including blockades, embargoes, etc.) in the first half of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the interwars period.
The lesson which resonated more was the Author’s proposed difference between the effects (uncertain by nature) and the efficacy (limited by default, outside the classical framework of the homo oeconomicus) of the economic weapon.
Furthermore, I’ve also retained the difference between the “negative economic weapon” (sanctions), and the “positive economic weapon” (financial and goods aid) to one of the belligerent sides.
Certainly that history and this specific book contain important lessons for the current use of sanctions, which are mostly US-centered in its origins and multipurposed (unlike the original “economic weapon” which contained solely a deterrence purpose, and was deemed as the most aggressive intervention short of war). Reading this book in 2024, it’s impossible not look for insights or comparisons with the array of sanctions applied to Russia in the aftermath of the Ukrainian invasion.
On the book’s shortcomings, I’d point out the lack of a more developed economic and legal analysis of sanctions. It’d would be very enlightening to read an account of the legal discussions along with the historical depiction of the political discussions.

[Jason Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sanctions had been practiced in Ancient Greece and by Napoleon but as we know then they were born out of the First World War . Trade embargo’s were developed to cut off Germany and to force neutral countries not to trade with them . After the war sanctions were used to try and prevent soviet expansion into Transylvania and Hungary with blockades against Russia and communist Romania . Arms embargoes followed . The German offensive had some effect but paled beside the German army’s loss of morale and the Russian had to be curtailed as Hungarians starved as a result.

What was the success of sanctions. ? Did they punish the guilty or the innocent ? Did they hurt an increasingly globalised economy and could they be sustained in times of depression ? Psychologically , did they give the punishing nation too much power real or perceived ?

All these questions were prescient as whenI grew up sanctions against apartheid South Africa were discussed as they are now against Russia . Sanctions often fell into the old debate between free trade and tariffs , which is why in the eighties economic sanctions against Russia by America caused a massive rift between Reagan and Thatcher, who was furious that economic politics were being treated as international and binding on her allies.

Conservatives were more pro sanctions than the left ,( though the idea could cut across party lines and caused at least one liberal defection to Labour ) and labour groups and unions lobbied against them if they saw them punishing the disadvantaged too much . Strikes were a new form of domestic sanction inverted . For diplomats they were a chance to make international impact away from the army and armed conflict, Some leading suffragettes were pro sanctions though other feminist groups opposed them when they saw suffering caused first hand .

A dry book but informative and important.

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before reaching out to "The Economic Weapon", make sure you understand what kind of a book it is. It is a book written by a historian about history. Not a book about political science written by a political scientist. Mulder brings in facts, but he doesn't make judgments and doesn't apply any learning to the current political landscape. He doesn't do any predictions. If you're fine with that, then it's a perfect book for you. As this expectation is clearly set by the book's description, I rate it five stars - IMHO, the author did a great job here. Even if personally, I'd rather read a mix of history and political science.

What did I find the most interesting?
1. importance of manganese in the pre-WWI world
2. how fascist Spain was forced not to join WWII, and how did that impact Hitler's strategic decisions
3. Italo-Ethiopian war and its economic background

What was some sort of disappointment? That the author stops at the end of WWII. There were some interesting applications of sanctions in the Cold War era, but maybe the author didn't want to touch controversies ...

Nevertheless - a very good book. Not for everyone, but if you're into history (especially of XX century), it's definitely not a waste of time.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nor a specific topic about which there's a lot of books for non-scholars, and frankly not something I've thought about much. I learned a lot, though sometimes the history of the individuals and their ideas on The Economic Weapon seemed to take precedent over the history of the sanctions themselves.

If anything, the ideas regarding sanctions feel very retroactive - before WWI they may have helped, and during they didn't help much. So they were tried more frequently in the Inter-War periods, where sometimes they worked (Greco-Bulgarian Conflict) and sometimes not (Italian conquest of Ethiopia) - and afterwards their threat may have caused more war (such as Hitler's interest in autarky so he couldn't be starved for resources).

[Sean McQuay · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're reading for "so whats" and applications to post-WW2 or current events, this isn't for you. Or, read the intro and conclusion, and extrapolate from there. The meat of the book is solidly WW1, inter-war, and WW2 period history.

The 3/5 star rating is my fault more than the book's. I thought this book would glean lessons from those times to review more modern uses of sanctions, but that's not at all the point here. Mulder builds the historical case for these weapons/tools and, in the conclusion, provides only the briefest of nods to how they're still used today.

@Mulder, please let me know when the sequel is ready!

[Graeme Newell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember reading back a few years ago that the very nature of warfare has been reinvented. An author I follow commented that no two countries with the McDonald's would ever go to war with each other because of the catastrophic economic consequences that would ensue.

The Russian invasion of the Ukraine disproved this theory, but it has proved an amazing case study in the effectiveness of economic warfare.

This book lays out the history of economic warfare and provides a detailed breakout of the times it was effective and ineffective. It lays out a solid case for the specific rules that must be followed and criteria that must be met in order for an economic blockade to have an impact.

[Fiona Brauer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history of sanctions from their WWI origins through the political and economic changes of the interwar period and WWII. I thought Mulder very elegantly wove through themes of the contested design and application of sanctions, with a focus on the effect vs efficacy gap. Given the extreme relevance to today’s geopolitics, I feel that he maybe was overly subtle in drawing out contemporary lessons— I wish he would have cashed in with some more explicit references to current dynamics.

[Sharanya Perez · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes nonfiction books can lay out the pieces of how a world phenomenon works and it’s cool to see it come together. Unfortunately this was not that book. The timeline jumped around a bit, and I did not see how WW1, interwar period, and WW2 fed into how we execute economic sanctions today. Tbh the best part was the 9 pages at the end detailing that! Mulder is an assistant prof and this is his first big book so I’ll cut him some slack though

[Travis Sundwall · Rating 3 out of 5]

The work is incredibly detailed and thorough.
It is not intended for casual readers.

The humanitarian impact of sanctions are noted, but not explored in depth. This is primarily a technical study of the subject.

It comprehensively covers the period from the outbreak of World War 1 through the end of World War 2.
Modern applications of sanctions are only touched on briefly in the book’s afterword.

[Justinas Rastenis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great historical overview on how the world started to use economic means in order to prevent future wars. The author gives detailed historical account and roots of what we call economic sanctions nowadays. Great book for contextual knowledge on the subject.

[Azra · Rating 4 out of 5]

ders için gerçek bir book review yazdıktan sonra “write a review” ibaresi biraz tetikleyici olsa da 3.5⭐️ yukarı yuvarladım.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid, insightful and creating an understanding of economic warfare