Research
The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War
A Foreign Affairs and The Economist Best Book of 2022
Winner of the 2023 Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR)
Out with Yale University Press in January 2022 in the US and February 2022 in Europe/UK
You can order it here via:
Bookshop (the best for US delivery)
Blackwell’s (best for UK delivery)
Translations with Nikkei BP (Japanese), Acropolis (Traditional Chinese), China Science & Technology Press (Simplified Chinese) and Suthat Publishing House (Vietnamese).
Reviews of The Economic Weapon:
“Valuable . . . offers many lessons for Western policy makers today.”—Paul Kennedy, Wall Street Journal
“Lucidly written, scholarly and thought-provoking.”—Gideon Rachman, Financial Times
“Mulder . . . looks at sanctions over the three decades after the First World War—and reaches unsettling conclusions. . . . The lessons are sobering.”—The Economist
“Mulder charts how the rise of economic sanctions and blockade during the interwar years, as a tool to enforce peace, drove the autarkic policies of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, ultimately destabilising the international system rather than fortifying it.”—Robin Harding, Financial Times
“Mulder argues in his impeccably well-researched and, because of its timeliness, gripping book that ‘sanctions did not stop political and economic disintegration but accelerated it’ in the interwar period. . . . Mulder’s book provides an uncomfortable warning that while sanctions have sometimes worked, they have also been contentious, ineffective and counterproductive.”—Emma Duncan, The Times
“This revelatory history of ‘economic warfare’—blockades and sanctions—reminds us that up to 400,000 people died of blockade-induced malnutrition in Central Europe in the First World War, plus 500,000 in the Ottoman Middle East. You will look at twentieth-century history with fresh eyes.”—Noel Malcolm, Daily Telegraph, “Perfect Holiday Reads”
“As Nicholas Mulder shows in The Economic Weapon, a much longer history lies behind the invention of modern sanctions.”—Tom Stevenson, London Review of Books
“A fascinating new book. . . . Taken as a superbly researched work of history, it lights up key aspects of the twentieth century in a deeply thought-provoking way.”—Noel Malcolm, Daily Telegraph
“Original and persuasive analysis. . . . For those who see economic sanctions as a relatively mild way of expressing displeasure at a country’s behavior, this book, charting how they first emerged as a potential coercive instrument during the first decades of the twentieth century, will come as something of a revelation.”—Lawrence D. Freedman, Foreign Affairs
“[A] superb study of sanctions during the interwar era. . . . Mulder’s fascinating story weaves together politics, economics and law [and] provides invaluable insight into the experience of sanctions one hundred years ago.”—Max Harris, Times Literary Supplement
“Terrifyingly relevant.”—Rogé Karma, New York Times’s “The Ezra Klein Show”
“Illuminating.”—Chris Miller, American Purpose
“Nicholas Mulder has succeeded admirably here in rescuing the historical origins of sanctions from relative obscurity. . . . Mulder’s thoroughly researched and intelligent assessment of the history of sanctions should be required reading for anyone contemplating Russia’s new aggression.”—Richard Overy, Journal of Strategic Studies
“The Economic Weapon is a superb account of the history of sanctions, and their profound impact on international politics. Although sanctions were once heralded as a force for peace, Mulder shows they often fail and sometimes make war more likely or even produce a humanitarian nightmare.&rdquot;—John Mearsheimer, author of The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities
“This is a tour de force of historical research and argument. With great subtlety and richness, Nicholas Mulder transforms our understanding of twentieth-century global and international history.”—David Edgerton, King’s College London
“Mulder reveals the history of liberalism’s ultimate weapon. An essential contribution both to scholarship and to the present-day debate on economic sanctions.”—Adam Tooze, author of Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy
Ongoing research
My second book, The Age of Confiscation, is an international history of the expropriation of private property in the 19th and 20th centuries. It shows increased state power, political and social revolutions, nationalism, new attitudes towards property rights, and decolonization combined to make the last two centuries a uniquely confiscatory age.
Teaching
I teach courses on nineteenth and twentieth-century European and international history, economic history, intellectual history and political economy. Below is a sample list of courses; syllabi are available upon request.
Histories of European Integration and Disintegration (History)
Fascism in the Twentieth Century: History and Theory (History/Government)
Economic Globalization and Democratic Crisis, 1870 - present (History)
Introduction to Modern European History, 1500 to the present (History)
Writing
“Building Big Green States in a Tumultuous World” (1 September 2022)
“Economic Sanctions in East Asia: Disruption and Adaptation” (13 July 2022)
“How Economic Sanctions Shaped Today’s Global Powers” (Interview with Pablo Pryluka) The Nation (17 May 2022)
“Economic War and the Commodity Shock” Phenomenal World (15 April 2022)
Interview on economic warfare, The Wire China (4 April 2022)
“Sanctions Against Russia Are A Form of War. It’s Time We Recognize That.” (Interview with Rogé Karma on the Ezra Klein Show) The New York Times (1 April 2022).
“The Toll of Economic War” Foreign Affairs (22 March 2022)
“A watershed in global economic history” The Economist (4 March 2022).
“The Economic Weapon” The New Statesman (3 March 2022)
“Keynes warned the world against using economic sanctions. His alternative is worth considering” The Guardian (20 January 2022)
“A plan to fund the global green transition already exists,” Financial Times (23 September 2021)
“The revolt against liberalism: what’s driving Poland and Hungary’s nativist turn?” The Guardian (24 June 2021)
“The Ambitions of Illiberal Democracy” n+1 (10 May 2021)
“Fritz Mannheimer - stockbroker of peace,” Engelsberg Ideas (24 March 2021)
“Sanctions are no climate fix,” Quincy Institute [part of a symposium on U.S.-China climate relations] (18 September 2020)
“The Coronavirus Oil Shock Is Just Getting Started,” Foreign Policy (23 April 2020) (with Adam Tooze)
“Steun voor coronabonds is ook in Nederlands belang” Financieel Dagblad (1 April 2020) (with Jerome Roos)
“How the Coronavirus War Economy Will Change the World” Foreign Policy (26 March 2020)
Bulgarian translation in Novi Levi (13 April 2020)
Estonian translation in Vikerkaar (April 2020)
“Homo Europus” [On Jean-Claude Juncker] New Left Review 120 (November-December 2019)
German translation in Merkur (June 2020)
“Can ‘Climate Sanctions’ Save the Planet?” The Nation (18 November 2019)
“Fracture and Polarization in the EU” Dissent (31 May 2019)
“The Origins of European Neoliberalism” n+1 (29 April 2019)
French translation: “Aux origines du néoliberalisme européen”, Le Grand Continent (5 June 2019)
“Lifting Sanctions Isn’t as Simple as It Sounds” Foreign Policy (15 April 2019) (with Esfandyar Batmanghelidj)
“Who’s Afraid of the International Criminal Court” The Nation (21 March 2019)
“Correlation Does Not Equal Compellence: The Weak Evidence for Economic Sanctions” Fellow Travelers (25 February 2019)
“A Leftist Foreign Policy Should Reject Economic Sanctions” The Nation (20 November 2018)
“A New Dutch Disease? Private Debt in the Netherlands” Private Debt Project (September 2016)
“Onze visie op Europa net zo failliet als Griekenland” Financieel Dagblad (18 August 2014)
“Anders denken om nieuwe crises te bezweren” Financieel Dagblad (10 November 2014) (with Joeri Schasfoort)
Publications
Contribution to H-Diplo roundtable discussion of Alexander Zevin, Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist (London: Verso, 2019), 3 December 2021.
“The Trump Administration and Economic Sanctions,’ H-Diplo, 23 September 2021.
Review of Max Harris, Monetary War and Peace: London, Washington, Paris, and the Tripartite Agreement of 1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), New Global Studies (10 September 2021).
Review of Alexander Watson, The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemyśl (London: Allen Lane, 2019), H-Diplo, April 2020.
‘The Trading with the Enemy Acts in the age of expropriation, 1914-49,’ Journal of Global History Vol. 15, No. 1 (March 2020).
‘‘A Retrograde Tendency’: The Expropriation of German Property in the Versailles Treaty,’ Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d'histoire du droit international Vol. 22, No. 1 (2020).
Review of Daniel Bessner and Nicolas Guilhot, eds., The Decisionist Imagination: Sovereignty, Social Science and Democracy in the 20th Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), H-Diplo, September 2019.
‘The Rise and Fall of Euro-American Inter-State War,’ Review of Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Changed the World (Simon & Schuster, 2017), Humanity, Vol. 10 (Spring 2019).
Review of Richard Nephew, The Art of Sanctions: A View From the Field (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), H-Diplo, September 2018.
‘War Finance,’ in Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, eds., 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Freie Universität Berlin (February 2018).
