Abraham Lincoln entered onto the presidency even as the breakaway southern confederacy was in the process of detaching itself from the union. Lincoln undestood this as a defiance of the constitution and an undermining of democracy (as represented by the election of 1860) and he initiated war measures to suppress what he would recognize only as a rebellion. He was careful not to agitate public opposition by billing this suppression as an abolition campaign. Nevertheless, union forces met with repeated defeats, and Lincoln was frustrated by over-mighty generals who believed that they knew better than he what was at stake. This frustration nudged him further toward incorporating some form of abolition into his war plans.

Before the American Civil War it was widely believed hat cotton was the key to victory. Many Southerners believed that by withholding cotton, they could force the North to accede to the South’s independence. Otherwise, Britain and other European importers of Southern cotton would be forced to intervene on the South’s behalf. Similarly, in the North the belief was widely held that cutting off Southern sales of cotton would impoverish the South and reduce its ability to buy arms, forcing it to give up its war. Early in the war, the South began to withhold cotton. Soon after, the North imposed a naval blockade that reduced Southern exports of cotton to Europe to a trickle. Although the South was weakened, it continued to fight for years. And for reasons including the moral imperatives of the war, the willingness to aid unemployed cotton workers, and the development of alternative sources of supply, cutting off exports of Southern cotton failed to have the effects on the North or on the Europeans that the South expected. The North was not forced to give up its war to defeat the Confederacy, and Britain and other European importers were not forced to intervene.

This chapter is based upon an extensive examination of US statutes, regulations, and executive orders from 1994 to 2021 containing US blacklists against Cuba. The chapter discusses the effects of the listing on individuals or targeted entities. Because many of these targets are Cuban government officials or state-owned enterprises, the listing of these persons and entities has the effect of interfering with sectors of the Cuban economy. The chapter also discusses the secondary impact on Cuba’s trade partners in general, and the consequent “chilling effect” that interferes in Cuba’s overall ability to import and export goods, and attract foreign investment.

Japan’s participation in World War II was a consequence of self-reinforcing cycles of Japan’s aggressions in East Asia and the economic sanctions imposed on Japan by the Western countries. During the war, the United States blocked transportation of natural resources to Japan from the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere using its naval power, particularly submarine attacks on Japanese ships. Japan managed to adapt to this blockade strategy of the United States by adopting various measures, including accelerating merchant shipbuilding to maintain the marine shipping capacity and substituting domestic resources for imported raw materials. Although limits were ultimately reached, these measures for adaptation enabled Japan to continue the war for more than three and a half years.

A pre-war policy of free trade in Britain and protection in Germany meant that Britain entered the war producing 35 per cent of its food needs while Germany produced 80 per cent. And yet Britain managed to feed itself adequately while Germany faced food shortages. Britain successfully adopted a range of counter-measures, exhibiting a capacity for substitution, allowing the economy to be flexible enough to survive the German blockade. The blockade accounted for at most around a quarter of the decline in German food consumption, which was largely the result of a collapse in domestic production caused by excessive mobilisation. German counter-measures were sometimes successful, but at other times indicate a less flexible economy with a limited capacity for substitution. The British government quickly reversed wartime policies to boost agricultural production and entered World War II equally vulnerable to submarine blockade, while Germany pursued autarkic policies to avoid dependence on seaborne imports.

The chapter distinguishes two types of economic warfare: ’capacity-focused economic warfare’ and ‘market-focused economic warfare’. The latter dominated the era of mercantilism. Still, the practices of economic war during the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ that opposed France and England were manifold and evolved throughout the period. The British pursued an aggressive strategy of market-focused economic warfare until the Pax Britannica made it largely superfluous. On the other hand, from 1713 on, the French tried to disentangle economic competition from military conflict, in times of both peace and war. Even if Napoleon was a mercantilist, the Continental System is best understood as a failed gamble on capacity-focused economic warfare rather than an exercise in mercantilism. This prepared the post-1815 advent of the liberal international order in which economic competition and war became separate entities.

In World War II, Britain and Germany fought each other using the instruments of economic warfare, chiefly naval blockade and aerial bombing. The blockades were anticipated, but the bombing war was novel and was poorly understood beforehand. Both sides undertook far-reaching measures of adaptation and defensive counter-measures. On each side, the priority given to the war effort required the costs of living, producing, and fighting under economic warfare to be displaced onto the civilian population. The modern industrialised economy proved to be a tough target. The British target was too tough: German leaders lacked the time, patience, and focus to crack it. The German target cracked eventually, but only after Allied expenditures of time and effort far exceeding what was anticipated. There, rising attrition and a deep fear of undermining civilian morale limited the resources that could be shifted from the civilian sphere to the military. Eventually, no additional sacrifices from civilians were forthcoming, and war production began to decline.

The world came closest to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We find that there existed two paths by which nuclear war might have occurred. The first path involves unrestrained hard-liners. Nuclear weapons did not deter some actors from proposing escalatory actions, including the use of nuclear weapons. Luckily, both Kennedy and Khrushchev reined in their respective hard-liners. Along the second path, situations – not known at the time – could have led to an initial use of nuclear weapons, after which events might have spiraled out of control. The US, for example, did not know that the Soviets had placed tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba. If the US had tried to invade Cuba to topple Castro – as some people advocated – then the Soviets might have used the weapons. Ultimately, Kennedy successfully used a quarantine and threatened force to compel the Soviets to withdraw their missiles from Cuba. The threat of nuclear war lingered behind these actions. In the end, however, the crisis ended not because of nuclear deterrence but rather because both sides reached a mutually acceptable bargain. Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba and to remove US missiles from Turkey; Khrushchev, meanwhile, agreed to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba.

By focusing on the British blockade of Germany, the prevailing narrative over-privileges one aspect of the use of food for belligerent purposes during the First World War. Blockade was not just Britain’s concern. France played a key role in its implementation, especially in respect to land routes and in the Mediterranean. Also, it was not just imposed in the Atlantic approaches. The other seas lapping both Europe and western Asia were vehicles for the application of sea power. In addition, starvation was not just an instrument of maritime warfare: it was also used by armies. Nor was Germany the only target; so too were its allies: Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. How the blocking of maritime trade affected their fighting power varied, depending on the management of their domestic food production, their distribution networks and their agricultural workforces. The blockade may have looked like a blunt instrument but its effectiveness depended on its interactions with other conditions, not all of them under governmental or even human control.

The safe administration of drugs is a key area in anaesthesia and intensive care. Ensuring patients receive the correct dose of the correct drug requires great care during the drawing up process (with any dilution required) and appropriate drug labelling. The anaesthetist must always remain vigilant for adverse drug reactions including anaphylaxis. Some of the drugs classes encountered maybe familiar to novices (such as opioids and some sedatives, antibiotics) but others will be less familiar (especially intravenous and volatile anaesthetic agents, both depolarising and non-depolarising neuromuscular blocking drugs, and nitrous oxide). Anaesthetists are often required to administer other drugs such as antibiotics, drugs affecting coagulation and drugs to assist imaging.

New areas are discussed, such as the transition away from nitrous oxide, desflurane and suxamethonium and the widespread use of sugammadex to reverse rocuronium, as well as the choice of total intravenous anaesthesia (TIVA) or volatile-based anaesthesia.

Between the mid-fifteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, norms on maritime warfare by both private and public actors developed through the intensification of maritime trade networks, European colonial and commercial expansion in other continents, the growing ascendancy of the sovereign state, and the emergence of a distinctive legal scholarship on topics of the law of nations. Although even among European political actors, there was still no general consensus on precise and binding norms governing maritime warfare, the building stones of a normative framework were gradually established which would be integrated from the later seventeenth century onwards into a more consistent body of international law. Prize courts played a crucial role in promoting the principles of such a legal framework, as did state practice on key issues such as blockade, contraband and neutrality.

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.