Nicholas Mulder

Nicholas Mulder is a Dutch historian at Cornell University whose The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (2022) argues that interwar sanctions developed from the experience and institutions of the First World War blockade. As at 29 July 2026, Cornell lists him as an assistant professor and identifies economic sanctions, international law and the history of war among his research fields (Cornell profile).

The argument

The Economic Weapon traces how the Allied blockade, a belligerent instrument that starved the Central Powers, was carried into peacetime through the League of Nations Covenant's Article 16. The interwar internationalists who built the economic weapon understood it as war continued by other means, and valued it precisely for its ferocity: the threat of total economic isolation was meant to deter aggression because the blockade's memory made deprivation credible. Mulder's ledger of the interwar record is discriminating. Against small states the threat worked, as in the Yugoslav and Greek episodes of 1921 and 1925; against major powers it failed, most consequentially over Abyssinia, where incomplete sanctions neither stopped Italy nor deterred the Axis. His most provocative claim runs further: the credible prospect of blockade pushed Germany, Italy and Japan towards autarky, conquest of resources and radicalisation, so the economic weapon helped produce the war it was meant to prevent. That feedback thesis is contested among historians. The book's core genealogy, linking interwar sanctions to wartime blockade, has become influential but remains an interpretation to be tested against other histories of international law, war and political economy. Mulder also recovers the instrument's less remembered twin: alongside the negative weapon of deprivation, the interwar generation designed a positive economic weapon of collective provision to sustain victims of aggression, a line of practice that reached maturity in Lend-Lease. The book closes on the paradox that sanctions grew more available after 1945 while remaining hardest against large, determined states.

Significance

Mulder challenges a categorical distinction between sanctions as peaceful pressure and economic warfare proper. His genealogy underwrites one historical case for treating some sanctions within economic warfare and gives depth to escalation concerns catalogued at Weaponisation backlash. It does not make legal authority, purpose or intensity irrelevant. His public commentary on Russia sanctions extended the book's cautions into the current debate, including discussion of humanitarian and systemic costs associated with the reserve freeze.

That conclusion remains an interpretation. Descent from wartime blockade does not make every sanctions programme legally or strategically equivalent to war. Classification requires separate evidence about authority, purpose, intensity, target and effect. Mulder's history is strongest as a warning against treating sanctions as costless or automatically peaceful.

It also restores institutional design to the history: deterrence, enforcement and assistance were debated as parts of a collective-security system, not as interchangeable labels for deprivation.

See also

The economic weapon (interwar sanctions doctrine) · Allied blockade of Germany (1914-1919) · Blockade and starvation strategy (WWI model) · League of Nations sanctions against Italy over Ethiopia (1935-1936) · Ministry of Blockade (United Kingdom, 1916-1919) · Economic warfare · Weaponisation backlash

Sources

• Nicholas Mulder, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).
• Cornell University, "Nicholas Mulder", faculty profile current to 29 July 2026.
• Nicholas Mulder, "The Trading with the Enemy Acts in the Age of Expropriation, 1914-1949", Journal of Global History 15, no. 1 (2020): 81-99.
• Boyd van Dijk, Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), for a distinct account of law and total war against which Mulder's genealogy can be tested.
• Council of the European Union, "EU sanctions against Russia explained" (status page accessed 29 July 2026), official source for the current measures discussed in the entry.