In some ways, Mulder’s account of the origins of a damaging but often ineffective tool reads as a dark counterpoint to the more optimistic vision of this period in Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro’s 2017 volume, 'The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World.' Hathaway and Shapiro put forth the notion that the diplomatic groundwork laid during this period helped make interstate war far less common in the decades to come. Though the two works come to very different conclusions, taken together, both suggest that much of what we often refer to as the 'postwar international order,' for better and worse, emerged after the first rather than the second world war ... a dense work of history, much of it laser-focused on a fairly short period in which the sanctions regime emerged. At times, one wishes that Mulder had taken the longer view to show how the signature tool of a fairly anomalous period of international relations grew into the default option it is today. Readers are sometimes left to fill in for themselves how the decisions made during this period would resonate in years to come.
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. In an original and persuasive analysis, Mulder shows how isolating aggressors from global commerce and finance was seen as an alternative to war that worked precisely because of the pain it imposed on the target society.
... valuable ... The league’s failure during the Abyssinian crisis has been told many times before, but Mr. Mulder’s account is superior in its use of American, British, French, German and League documents to reconstruct this embarrassing tale ... observes strict chronological limits, but offers many lessons for Western policy makers today.
