Today, economic sanctions are generally regarded as an alternative to war. But for most people in the interwar period, the economic weapon was the very essence of total war. The initial intention behind creating the economic weapon was not to use it–economic sanctions were intended to be a form of
Janek Wasserman— Americans searching Amazon’s best-seller list in June 2010 would have encountered a surprising title at the top, above the likes of books by Stieg Larsson, George W. Bush, Malcolm Gladwell, and Michael Lewis: Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. The “Definitive Edition” had appeared in 2007, yet it sold only
John R. Bockstoce— The fur trade in North America was an important part of the continent’s economic and social evolution. For better and for worse, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the fur trade caused changes in Native American societies. It provided wealth but simultaneously pushed the boundaries of
2007 marked the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain, an anniversary celebrated with government programs as a great turning point in the history of the nation. Yet across the Atlantic, in the Jamaican parish of St. Elizabeth, a bicentennial of an entirely different kind was commemorated: