Nicholas Mulder

Nicholas Mulder's first book, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, (Yale University Press January 2022), is 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. It became embedded in the League of Nations and national state policy, and spurred new economic interventions, as well as anti-liberal bids for autarky. The book argues that sanctions were a potent but unstable and unpredictable political tool, one whose importance to the international crisis of the 1930s and 1940s is much greater than usually assumed.

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His next book, The Age of Confiscation, is an international history of expropriation. The book focuses on the process of making and taking property within the great transformations of the 19th and 20th centuries, and examines how large-scale asset transfers have been a vital force in the political and economic history of capitalist democracies.

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Mulder has written about European history, politics, economics, and international affairs for The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, n+1, New Left Review, The Nation, The New Statesman, and other publications. His research has been featured in The Atlantic, POLITICO, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and De Standaard.

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He is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Cornell University. He is a historian of twentieth-century 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.

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