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 core: 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.
