Nicholas Mulder

Nicholas Mulder is a historian of modern Europe and international political economy. As at 1 November 2026, Cornell University lists him as Associate Professor and Milstein Faculty Fellow, with research fields including economic sanctions, expropriation, war and international law. He is the author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (2022). [Cornell faculty profile; Yale University Press bibliographic record.]

The historical argument

In his May 2022 interview with Pablo Pryluka, Mulder connected interwar sanctions to the First World War blockade and the League of Nations' use of economic pressure in peacetime. He argued that remembered deprivation helped make threats effective against smaller states, while the Depression and anticipated isolation strengthened fascist efforts to secure resources. This is an attributed interpretation, not a finding that sanctions alone produced the Second World War. [Mulder, interview with Pryluka.]

In a separate interview with Nick Serpe, published on 4 March 2022, Mulder explicitly rejected assigning sanctions all or most of the responsibility for that war. He treated their interaction with nationalism, ideology, earlier economic warfare and the Great Depression as an important contributing process. He also distinguished a negative instrument of deprivation from a positive instrument of assistance, connecting proposed League financing for victims of aggression with his interpretation of Lend-Lease. The interview was conducted before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine; its contemporary remarks must be read in that setting. [Mulder, interview with Serpe, answers on autarky and the positive economic weapon; editorial introduction.]

Significance and limits

Mulder's May 2022 interview cautioned against projecting interwar conditions onto the present. It emphasised military developments and diplomacy alongside sanctions, and the difficulty of sustaining their use where many states remain outside the coalition. These dated positions challenge assumptions of costless pressure. They do not determine the current legality or effects of Russia measures, nor make every sanctions programme equivalent to war. [Mulder, interview with Pryluka, final answers.]

The distinction between coercion and assistance preserves a wider institutional question: how collective security combines pressure on aggressors with support for those under attack. His historical argument remains open to comparison with other accounts of war, law and political economy. No claim of a settled scholarly consensus or a single cause of escalation is made here. [Editorial synthesis of Mulder's two interviews.]

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

• Cornell University, "Nicholas Mulder", full faculty profile checked 1 November 2026.
• Nicholas Mulder, interview with Pablo Pryluka, "How Economic Sanctions Shaped Today's Global Powers", The Nation, 17 May 2022. Full interview; the publisher states that it was edited for length and clarity.
• Nicholas Mulder, interview with Nick Serpe, "The History of Sanctions", Dissent, 4 March 2022. Full publicly retrievable interview, conducted before the invasion; no exact interview day is supplied.
• Nicholas Mulder, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022). The publisher verifies the bibliographic record; the complete book was not available for this account. The attributed arguments above are grounded in the full interviews.
• Nicholas Mulder, The Age of Confiscation: Making and Taking Property in the Creation of the Modern World (Allen Lane, 2026), hardback ISBN 9780241582718. Publisher record lists publication on 29 October 2026. Bibliographic addition only; the book's substantive claims have not been reviewed here.