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This chapter explains the rationale for the volume, arguing that historical studies of economic warfare require greater nuance than has traditionally been afforded by an overreliance on conceptions developed by classical naval theorists such as Alfred Thayer Mahan. It presents an overview of the chapters in this collection, which are grouped around four key themes: neutrals and neutrality; the role of non-naval bureaucracies in conducting campaigns of economic warfare; the ways in which non-state actors have interacted with and taken advantage of episodes of economic warfare; and studies of economic warfare as an element in the broader grand strategy of states. The chapter concludes by offering suggestions for new approaches to understanding economic warfare and the sea. A more international approach which deconstructs the workings of the global economy promises rich rewards for new studies. Similarly, interrogating ideas about economic warfare, and the rhetoric surrounding its potency, may offer a better guide to understanding the reasons for its use in the past. Lastly, given that sea power matters chiefly in the ways in which it influences events on land, more must be done to excavate the link between action at sea and how it impinges on military operations on land.

Chapter 3 explores the dynamics of intergovernmental competition and conflict. President Roosevelt approached postwar schemes with uncertainty during America’s first years in World War II. Other US government agencies contested the US Army’s claim that it should handle postwar governance primarily or exclusively. As a result, clashes occurred at the highest levels of the Roosevelt administration that were exacerbated by the frictions in FDR’s cabinet that predated the entry of the United States into World War II. In particular, New Dealers such as Vice President Henry Wallace and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes played key roles in the disputes. In interagency disputes over the fate of Wallace’s Board of Economic Warfare, the imposition of martial law in Hawaii, the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the Western Defense Zone, and the army’s establishment of the School of Military Government, civilian New Dealers lost in every case to the army. As a result the army emerged the organization that would eventually plan and implement postwar occupation.

This chapter analyses the systemic effects of the Franco-British revolutionary and Napoleonic wars on American trade and shipping. The recourse to neutral carriers consistently reduced the impact of belligerents’ economic warfare against enemy trade, but it also alleviated the consequences of the enemy’s disruptive policy on its own economy. Merchants of neutral countries took advantage of the context to expand their business, but the range of their opportunities varied in time and space, as they depended on the evolving needs of each of the belligerents, and the sea power in a given area. As a result, American ships met with different opportunities in Bordeaux, with its rich agricultural hinterland – where they considerably sustained local interests – and in the Mediterranean, where they faced the fierce competition of other neutral carriers, and met consistent difficulties in preserving their neutrality with regards to European belligerents and Barbary States. While pointing at the difficulty of concretely implementing economic warfare, the comparison also illustrates the need to precisely contextualise the effects of economic warfare.

This chapter introduces the Joint Intelligence Bureau. It examines the debates that occurred within the defence and intelligence establishments over the form and content of the intelligence machinery for peace, and on the merits of centralization in general. Central to these debates was the question about what to do with several wartime organizations that fulfilled crucial functions but that could not be sustained in peacetime. The roles of three of these, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Intelligence Section Operations, and the Inter Service Topographical Department were merged in the JIB. The chapter examines the new agency, its role, and the staff, demonstrating that although many vital lessons had been learned from the failings of the inter-war years the new structure was far from perfect.

This chapter describes the international pharmaceutical industry’s transformation during World War II as a result of U.S. economic warfare initiatives in Latin America. Provisioning drugs and implementing wartime drug controls offered diplomatic leverage as the United States sought to secure exports of raw materials essential for military mobilization while working to undermine Axis economic power in the region. In Peru and Bolivia, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Warfare worked with corporations and national governments to enforce the replacement of German with U.S. manufactured drugs essential for workers in critical wartime industries. The United States became the dominant global supplier of pharmaceuticals, the major power determining international coca commodity flows, and the driving force behind an ideological regulatory apparatus foundational to international drug control.

This chapter is the first of two to explore United States President Thomas Jefferson’s approach to the Tripolitanian War. It argues that Jefferson sought to protect and expand American commerce whilst eroding the trade networks of England and France as means of gaining a stronger position in the international economy. It suggests that Jefferson’s use of commerce as a tool of foreign policy was not related to pacifism and diplomacy, but rather an extra arm of defence on the world stage. It provides a thorough exploration of Jefferson’s political and economic motives for the war, and in doing so compares Jefferson’s speeches to the language of Realpolitik. It also explores the advocacy of economic warfare; and details the feud between Jefferson and Hamilton concerning British rule. It concludes that the Tripolitanian War can be considered a component of a larger geopolitical strategy to defend and advance the political and economic interests of America. It also asserts that historians should treat this war within the nineteenth-century political sphere, and refrain from making comparisons to twenty-first century American foreign policy.

This chapter is the second of two to explore United States President Thomas Jefferson’s approach to the Tripolitanian War. Unlike the previous chapter, this one presents Jefferson as both reluctant to use force and unprepared for the length and toll of the campaign. It examines his fluctuating attitude toward the navy; concern over the financial cost of war; difficulty in securing an end to the war; and the handling of the disastrous loss of the Philadelphia. It concludes that though Jefferson was ambivalent and reluctant to enter war and failed to use sufficient force for the majority of the campaign, he was triumphant in avoiding paying tribute to Tripoli, and the war was an overall success for the United States.