W. N. Medlicott

W. N. Medlicott was the British diplomatic historian and official historian of Britain's economic blockade in the Second World War. His two-volume The Economic Blockade (1952, 1959) remains a standard documentary account of that campaign and a major source for its administrative and operational history.

The work

Commissioned for the official History of the Second World War civil series and published by HMSO, The Economic Blockade reconstructs the campaign of the Ministry of Economic Warfare from its stand-up in September 1939: contraband control and the navicert system, rationing of neutral imports, preclusive purchasing in neutral markets, the Statutory List blacklisting of firms trading with the enemy, and the progressive fusion of blockade with intelligence and, later, with bombing target selection. Working from the ministry's files, Medlicott documented both the machinery's sophistication and its limits: the early-war expectation that economic pressure might itself bring Germany down did not survive the fall of France, and against an enemy that had conquered a continent's resources, blockade could constrain and tax the war economy but not strangle it. Its heaviest effects arrived late, and only in combination with military attrition and bombing. Medlicott himself was a professor of international history, from 1953 in the Stevenson Chair at the London School of Economics, and the blockade volumes sit alongside his broader diplomatic histories.

Significance

Medlicott's sober verdict, that economic warfare was a real but slow and conditional weapon, supplied the empirical corrective to interwar faith in the economic weapon and remains the reference point for claims about what blockade achieved between 1939 and 1945. His account of the machinery, lists, licences, intelligence-led interdiction, and neutral-state bargaining, describes the direct institutional ancestors of the modern designation and enforcement apparatus, and successor scholarship on the MEW campaign and on economic warfare generally builds on his volumes.

See also

British Ministry of Economic Warfare campaign against Germany (1939-1945) · Economic warfare · The economic weapon (interwar sanctions doctrine) · Blockade and starvation strategy (WWI model) · Ministry of Blockade (United Kingdom, 1916-1919) · Economic statecraft

Sources

• W. N. Medlicott, The Economic Blockade, 2 vols, History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Civil Series (HMSO, 1952 and 1959).
• Australian War Memorial, catalogue record for W. N. Medlicott, *The Economic Blockade*.
• WorldCat, bibliographic record for W. N. Medlicott, *The Economic Blockade*.