The blockade has been a long-standing economic and military tactic to isolate enemy nations and force them to endure siege conditions. This chapter examines how British or pro-British cultural actors managed to disseminate propagandized cultural texts and information via secret channels of communication, smuggling in the cultural capital of the enemy nation(s). The first example is the Bibliothèque britannique, the Geneva-based journal which commissioned and published many translations of British scientific and literary works during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; second, the translation activity during 1914–18 with poetry as case study; third, the role played by the pro-European group, the Federal Union and finally the internationalism and human rights discourse of writing advocated by PEN in London during the Second World War. The chapter concludes with a Cold War section examining soft diplomacy in the use of literature and art to disseminate liberal thinking behind the Iron Curtain. How far do these blockade moments articulate federal and internationalist aims and projects while risking isolationist rhetoric in the construction of liberal ideals in wartime?

This chapter challenges the dominant paradigm of a ‘use of force’ in article 2(4) of the UN Charter as a coherent concept by giving examples from the subsequent agreement and subsequent practice of States showing that none of the elements of a ‘use of force’ is strictly necessary for the definition to be met. It examines anomalous examples which lack the elements of physical means, physical effects, gravity or hostile intent, taking as a basis of analysis certain acts listed in the 1974 Definition of Aggression: military occupation (article 3(a)), blockade (article 3(c)), mere presence in violation of a Status of Forces Agreement (article 3(e)) and indirect use of force through inter-State assistance (article 3(f)) or through non-State armed groups (article 3(g)). It also examines anomalous examples of non-‘use of force’: acts which appear to meet the criteria but are not characterised as such by States in their subsequent practice. These include forcible response to aerial incursion and purported maritime law enforcement. This chapter then offers possible explanations for these anomalous examples and discusses the implications for the interpretation of a prohibited ‘use of force’.

The unforeseen extent and duration of World War I interrupted much of Europe’s access to the abundant lands of the New World, on which its food supply had come to depend. In Germany, the British blockade starved some 800,000 people; mortality increased most (over 60 percent) from malnutrition-related tuberculosis. Central to the appeal of Hitler’s National Socialist movement was its call for the conquest of Lebensraum in eastern Europe and western Russia – and the expulsion or extermination of those regions’ native inhabitants – as a means to self-sufficiency in food. Both in Mein Kampf and in his “second book,” Hitler argued explicitly that neither factor substitution, factor mobility, nor new technologies could guarantee Germans’ food supply; only the admittedly costly and risky route of conquest would suffice. When Stresemann’s “export powerhouse” strategy of factor mobility collapsed after 1929, Hitler’s alternative won strong popular support. In the “breakthrough” election of 1930, the Nazi vote increased most in the cities that had suffered the highest wartime mortality from tuberculosis. Hitler’s genocidal plan appealed especially to the populations that had endured the worst wartime hunger and death.

When war broke out in 1914, both sides initiated elaborate efforts to shift the world economy to a war footing. The war divided trade partners and exposed dependence on imports of strategic materials, prompting efforts to exploit enemies’ commercial vulnerabilities through the tools of blockade and submarine warfare. As the belligerents struggled to secure their supply lines, they also began to devise new legal and institutional safeguards to ensure permanent access to strategic materials in peacetime. Lucien Coquet, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, Bernhard Harms, and Richard Riedl participated in the operation of the war economy and helped initiate planning for the future transition from war to peace. Their stories show how the experience of economic warfare was framed by the trade institutions and information networks inherited from the belle époque.

Siege warfare followed most of the practice established before, but a larger use of guns, the improvement of gunpowder and sometimes orders to fight to the last stand led to an escalation in violence. This was enhanced too by the growing involvement of civilians, especially in Spain, which gave a more exacerbated dimension to the fights

The maritime aspects of the wars of the French Revolution and Empire were asymmetric, between a British seapower empire of oceanic connectivity and a French dominated European system that focussed on territorial control and economic restriction. The inclusive British political system privileged naval strength, the defence of trade, and sea control. This position was based on battle fleet dominance, which remained undefeated across two decades. British identity became ever more closely linked to naval success as Nelson, the Nile and Trafalgar added new names to national culture. This sustained long-term funding for major infrastructure projects, new ships, and high levels of skilled manpower. Superior ships and men enabled the Royal Navy to defeat naval rivals, and attacks on commercial shipping by national warships and privateers. Naval dominance sustained a hard-line economic war that broke the Russian economy, and seriously damaged that of France, while the City of London and the British economy more generally continued to support the national war effort through extensive capital loans, and private measures, such as those of Lloyds Patriotic Fund. Seapower could not defeat Napoleon, it supported a grand alliance that would achieve that aim. By 1815 Britain had become a global seapower empire of unrivalled wealth and influence.

This chapter deals with the internal situation and the home front during the first two years of the war. It analyses Germany’s economic situation, the question of blockade, foodstuff, shortages and internal unity, as well as war finance. It concludes that Germany could cope, during the first half of the war, with the enormous challenges of the war.

The law of neutrality introduces a concomitant set of rights and obligations between belligerents and neutrals. The law as it has settled at the turn of the twentieth century has remained the same in relation to its basic principles, and it has easily adapted to the evolution of the law of the sea, globalized trade and arms technology. The intrusiveness of belligerent practice in the form of exclusion zones, navicerts and distance blockade has become part of the law provided that it does not deviate from the humanitarian law of armed conflict. Moreover, the four Geneva Conventions and the First Additional Protocol admit a humanitarian role for neutral States.

Within weeks of the Great War’s outbreak, American Jews rushed to send relief for Jews caught in the crossfire of crumbling empires. To aid Jewish war sufferers, American Jews founded the Joint Distribution Committee. To move aid in wartime, American Jews worked with the US government, the largest neutral power. Cash aid traveled to Jews in war zones through the US diplomatic pouch and family connections. Preexisting Jewish organizations in Europe delivered the monies. The war promoted the growth of new American charitable organizations, and these organizations took their American visions abroad to help others, with the support of the US government, which had no government programs like USAID in place at the time. American Jews joined America’s expanding state at the critical juncture of the war, wandering into the center of American foreign policy and less official humanitarian relief initiatives to carry out basic relief to Jews abroad. They became more “American,” while relying on the Jewish diasporic network and immigrant practices.

Inspired by Susan Leigh Foster’s insight that bodies are “articulate matter,” Chapter 5 engages with tactics of movement and stillness in Indigenous activism that illuminate contemporary Indigenous coalitions of resistance and solidarity. I take up Foster’s insights to describe the signifying power of Indigenous demonstrations in Idle No More, at the Elsipogtog blockade, and in the Healing Walk. Through these interventions in public spaces and the sacrifice zones of settler civilization, Indigenous demonstrations articulate continuance in the center of the violence of climate disruption and global capital.

Turning the national wars of the Allies into a coherent Allied grand strategy was the ambitious project of the new British Prime Minister, Lloyd George. He however needed to overcome Allied resistance while simultaneously facing unprecedented crises: the Russian Revolution and the U-Boat campaign.

After the British swept the seas of German cruisers by early 1915, the naval war shifted to European waters, where the Allied navies adopted a strategy of “distant blockade” against Germany (on a line between Scotland and Norway) and against Austria-Hungary (across the Otranto Straits). At Dogger Bank (24 January 1915) Beatty’s battle cruiser squadron defeated its German counterpart, prompting William II to order his capital ships to remain in port for an entire year. At Jutland (31 May-1 June 1916), the war’s only fleet-scale battle, Scheer’s High Sea Fleet won a tactical victory over Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet but failed to break the blockade; afterward Scheer advocated resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, attempted during 1915 but abandoned under pressure from the United States. After unrestricted submarine warfare brought the United States into the war in April 1917, the British and Americans devised a convoy system to ensure the flow of US troops and supplies to Europe. In 1917–18 the blockaded fleets of Germany and Austria-Hungary (along with Russia, whose Baltic and Black Sea fleets were similarly idled) experienced serious mutinies. For Germany, a prewar net importer of food, the inability to trade by sea arguably was the single most important factor in its ultimate defeat.

This chapter assesses the role of maritime power and global logistics in the outcome of the naval war in the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian Ocean. Theories of sea power and land power: Mahan and Mackinder. Blockade in Allied and Axis strategy. The vital importance of the British merchant fleet. New German submarine tactics, and Allied counter-measures. The US Navy in the Atlantic before the formal outbreak of war. Success of the U-boat attacks in early 1942. Allied anti-submarine warfare, including communications intelligence and radar. Large-scale Allied construction of escort ships, and growing role of long-range patrol aircraft and escort carriers. Admiral Dönitz recalls U-boats from the North Atlantic in May 1943. Inability of the German forces, including the U-boats, to oppose amphibious operations. Failure of new U-boat types. Limited success of the Japanese submarine fleet against Allied supply lines. Japanese failure to develop effective escort forces. The American submarine campaign develops after torpedo problems are solved. Global importance of Allied construction of new merchant ships and port facilities; this is crucial for Allied survival and then for successful global counter-attack. Advantages of the oceanic powers over the continental ones.

This chapter analyzes the forces pulling Germany into war in 1914 and how both the international republic of letters and the integrated world economy were shattered by it and the crippling blockade imposed by Britain. It also explores the work done by Hermann Schumacher, Max Sering, and Gustav Schmoller to rationalize wartime raw materials and the food supply, as well as their activity advocating for unrestricted submarine warfare. Despite strong prewar ties between Germany and the United States and active efforts to court American public opinion by Bernhard Dernburg in New York, the “war of words” was won easily by the Entente. The decision for unrestricted submarine warfare is set in the context of the failure of dreadnought deterrence and the tightening blockade, which had rendered much of the High Seas Fleet impotent and led to the loss of Germany's overseas colonies and bases.A growing rift emerged by 1916 between populist forces unleashed by Alfred Tirpitz and the “submarine professors,” on the one hand, and the Kaiser and government of Bethmann Hollweg, on the other, which now also included Karl Helfferich as Treasury Secretary.