The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions in the Interwar Period

Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. These measures developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting economic globalization to defend international order and garnered appeal as an alternative to war. This talk will examine how interwar sanctions redefined the boundary between war and peace, underpinned the League of Nations, stimulated new economic interventions and shifts in international law, and played an important and underappreciated role in the great world crisis of the 1930s.

 

Nicholas Mulder is assistant professor of modern European history at Cornell University. He specializes in the political and economic history of the interwar period and is the author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (Yale, 2022). He is currently writing an international history of property confiscation in the 19th and 20th centuries.

 

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