Prof. Nicholas Mulder provides a history of the interwar origins of economic sanctions, showing how they reconfigured international affairs by enabling distant coercion against civilian societies in peacetime. Based on wartime blockade practices, the instrument of sanctions offered a novel way to prevent war.

This presentation is based on his first book, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, recently published in January 2022 by Yale University Press.

About the speaker

Nicholas Mulder is an Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University. He works on European and international history from 1870 to the present. His research focuses on political, economic, and intellectual history, with particular attention to the era of the world wars between 1914 and 1945.

This seminar is part of the spring seminar series with the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS).