January 19, 2023

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

10 minutes

A Hoover History Working Group Seminar with Nicholas Mulder.

Mulder’s first book, The Economic Weapon, is a history of the interwar origins of economic sanctions, arguing that sanctions were a potent but unstable and unpredictable political tool whose importance to the crisis of the 1930s and 1940s is greater than usually assumed. Based on wartime blockade practices, sanctions offered a novel way to prevent war. The practice became embedded in the League of Nations and national state policy, and spurred new economic interventions, as well as anti-liberal bids for autarky.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Nicholas Mulder is assistant professor of history at Cornell University, as well as a Milstein Faculty Fellow. His research focuses on Europe’s political, economic, and intellectual history, with particular attention to the era of the world wars between 1914 and 1945. Most recently, he has also emerged as one of the leading commentators on the use of sanctions against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.

Click here to read Nicholas Mulder’s Wall Street Journal article, “Don’t Expect Sanctions to Win the Ukraine War.”

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

This talk is part of the History Working Group Seminar Series. A central piece of the History Working Group is the seminar series, which is hosted in partnership with the Hoover Library & Archives. The seminar series was launched in the fall of 2019, and thus far has included six talks from Hoover research fellows, visiting scholars, and Stanford faculty. The seminars provide outside experts with an opportunity to present their research and receive feedback on their work. While the lunch seminars have grown in reputation, they have been purposefully kept small in order to ensure that the discussion retains a good seminar atmosphere.

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