Nicholas Mulder, "The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War" (Yale UP, 2022)

New Books in Economic and Business History · Feb 16, 2022 · 1h 6m

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…