Explore the vast range of titles available.

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.

This review essay examines three recent books about the advent of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s. It argues that after three decades of scholarship that have mapped neoliberalism as a set of policies and an epoch, we are now witnessing a new turn in the literature focused on understanding why neoliberalism came to dominate the global political and economic order in the first place. This more ambitious agenda opens up complex questions of agency, intentionality, and causality. The \"neoliberal transition debate\" therefore concerns the dominant philosophy of history among intellectual and economic historians.

This article examines one of the most consequential legal–political models for the confiscation of private property in the twentieth century: the Trading with the Enemy Acts (TEAs). Two laws with this name were passed in Britain (1914) and the United States (1917), enabling the large-scale expropriation of ‘enemies’ and ‘aliens’. The extra-territorial application of these laws during the era of total war led to the globalization of its paradigm of expropriation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The TEAs made the administrative process of dispossession effective and profitable for liberal states. The US law was repurposed for domestic use during the New Deal, while its British counterpart played an unforeseen role during decolonization and the great partitions of the late 1940s, as the nascent nation-states of India, Pakistan, and Israel used it to constitute themselves as territorial and economic units by taking land and property from ‘evacuees’ and ‘absentees’. The article provides a short history of these four national cases in their international context and argues that the history of the TEAs shows that state-driven mass expropriation was much more common throughout the mid twentieth century than usually supposed; the ‘age of extremes’ was also in part an ‘age of expropriation’.

\"Tracing the history of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder combines political, economic, legal, and military history to reveal 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.\"

Economic sanctions as We know them today emerged a century ago. Toward the end of World War I, organized material pressure emerged as a new answer to an old question: how could war be prevented without resorting to military force? What the victors called their “economic weapon” would be used by the League of Nations to bring wayward states to their senses. After the horrific destruction of the Great War, international institutions adopted techniques of economic war and reframed them as an antidote to war itself. By the end of the war, it was clear that sanctions were likely to

Can war be banished from the earth? Throughout modern history, world peace has been a powerful ideal. It has also been one of the most elusive. Each major war produced its share of cynics as well as visionaries. Pessimists saw war as an inescapable part of the human condition. Optimists viewed growing wealth, expanding self-government, and advancing technology as drivers of slow but steady moral progress. This veering between hope and desolation took on a new urgency after the unprecedented destruction of World War I. The victors created a new international organization, the League of Nations, which promised to unite

Although snow is known to influence landform genesis and distribution, the spatial associations between snow and landforms within particular cold regions has received limited research attention. We present a case study from the high Drakensberg of southern Africa, comparing the contemporary spatial pattern of longest-lasting cold-season snow patches with the distribution patterns of active and relic cold region landforms. Two 30 m resolution sets of TM images dated 3 and 19 August 1990 and a DEM were used to demonstrate the geographic trends of snow patch depletion during late winter. Geomorphological phenomena with known coordinates were then incorporated into the GIS. The spatial distribution of several periglacial land-forms (earth hummocks, stone-/turf-banked lobes, block deposits, large sorted patterned ground) coincides with topographic positions that limit snow accumulation. However, the strong spatial association between longest-lasting snow patches and palaeo-moraines implies substantial snow accumulation at some high altitude south-facing sites during the last glacial cycle.

This history identifies international economic sanctions as a central and understudied innovation of interwar internationalism. Sanctions were initially conceived bythe victors of World War I—principally Britain, France, and the United States—as an 'economic weapon' inspired by new techniques of blockade and economic warfare developed in 1914-1919. Enshrined in Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, sanctions entailed the coercive economic isolation of countries that violated peace treaties. Sanctions were novel because they were a form of economic pressure imposed against civilian populations in peacetime and internationally legitimated as punishment for the crime of aggression—a break with preceding centuries in which such acts of economic isolation were only allowed in time of war.The study clarifies the differences between sanctions as they emerged in the early twentieth century and other forms of economic pressure—embargoes, (pacific) blockades, boycotts—and recovers the meaning and agendas behind sanctions as an anti-war instrument. It argues that the wartime origins and coercive nature of sanctions were widely recognized by their advocates and critics alike, and that this recognition persisted deep into the 1920s and 1930s, when the discourse of international blockade and economic weaponry was slowly displaced by the more neutral language of 'sanctions' and 'collective security'. It demonstrates that the most popular political and strategic theory of sanctions was one which conceptualized them as a deterrent: sanctions were thought to be capable of keeping the rulers and populations of other states peaceful by threatening them with quick and universal material devastation if they transgressed international rules. It emphasizes how the introduction of economic sanctionsentailed a revolution in international law, ending the centuries-old concept of neutrality: to effectively isolate aggressors, interactions with neutral countries had to cease, and impartiality was delegitimized.In the following pages, a new interpretation of the international political, economic and military crisis of the 1930s is developed which centers around the role of sanctions as an instrument of deterrence in an interdependent world economy. While the rapid advent of sanctions meant that many countries were materially and politically not quite prepared to implement them, the discourse of the economic weapon become very strong and feared, partially by reviving memories of the power of blockade in WWI. The existence and threat of sanctions was therefore an unintentional stimulus to autarky, and a factor which accelerated attempts by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and militarist Japan to aggressively challenge the interwar order.Finally, this analysis considers sanctions as a form of politicization of the early twentieth century world economy. It recovers the forgotten interwar history of the 'positive economic weapon,' a mirror image of the negative instrument of sanctions that focused on provision and resource mobilization instead of deprivation and interdiction. It shows how attempts to construct this financial instrument against aggression failed in the 1920s and 1930s before appearing, in a different guise, in the form of Lend-Lease, during WWII, and how this material support function improved the appeal of internationalist institutions after 1945.Altogether, this work situates the birth of economic sanctions in its political, material, legal, theoretical and strategic context, helping us understand why these measures inspired by economic total war against civilians survived far beyond WWI into the twenty-first century, where they continue to form a prominent part of international affairs.

In july 1941, the Czech economist Antonín Basch delivered a series of lectures at Columbia University. Basch had worked for the Czechoslovak commerce ministry and central bank and attended the I world economic conferences of the 1920s and 1930s before moving to the United States. Despite being exiled from his country, now ruled as a protectorate in the Nazi empire, Basch did not think that the aggression of the Axis powers meant that the League had been bound to fail. “The principal lesson of the war,” Basch argued in New York, “has been the interrelation today of the whole world