Author Archives: Nicholas Mulder

About Nicholas Mulder

Nicholas Mulder is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Columbia. He works on twentieth-century modern European and international history, with a special interest in political economy, varieties of internationalism, and the history of war. He is currently finishing his dissertation "The Economic Weapon: Interwar Internationalism and the Rise of Sanctions,'' which examines the interwar origins of economic sanctions in Euro-American politics between 1914 and 1945, and charts how this instrument initially became established as part of the disciplinary toolkit of today's international order. He will be a Postdoctoral Associate in 2019-2020 and Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Cornell University starting in fall 2020.

The Rise and Fall of Euro-American Inter-State War

April 26, 2019 by
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The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017. xxii + 430 pp. If one asked a group of historians, political scientists, and lawyers what they would consider the single most important treaty or international agreement of the last two centuries, one could expect a familiar set of names to be cited: Vienna, Versailles, the Geneva Conventions, Bretton Woods, Yalta, San Francisco, the GATT, Rome, Helsinki. Few would name Continue reading → Continue reading →

The Shifting Meaning of War and Peace

November 17, 2017 by
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This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. This is part 5. The interwar period was a time of heightened confusion about the boundary between war and peace. The meaning of both terms became thoroughly destabilized by political events. In this context the legal effort to end war through outlawry had unexpected and counterproductive effects.[1] For by removing war from the realm of acceptable Continue reading →

Trade, Statehood, and Conquest

November 16, 2017 by
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This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. This is part 4. Hathaway and Shapiro claim that “the outlawry of war in 1928—and the broader legal transformation that it unleashed—made it safer to trade” (344). By introducing a safeguard against conquest, Kellogg-Briand released the energies of free trade and colonial nationalism, resulting in a globalized world economy and a quadrupling of the number of Continue reading →

Neutrality, Sanctions, and Outcasting

November 15, 2017 by
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This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. This is part 3. The Internationalists compellingly shows how the multi-layered nature of Old World Order made it difficult to undo all its principles at once. One of these principles was neutrality. Hathaway and Shapiro are not fans of it. They regard it as an “excuse” not to take action against aggressors and as a way Continue reading →

Outlawry and its History

November 14, 2017 by
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This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. This is part 2. Hathaway and Shapiro announce in their introduction that “this book is, at its core, a work of intellectual history” (xx). I am not sure that this does justice to the ambition of their project, which is much larger. In their conclusion, they summarize its essential point as the insight that “the choice Continue reading →

The Rise and Fall of Euro-American Inter-State War: Introduction

November 13, 2017 by
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This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017. xxii + 430 pp. If one asked a group of historians, political scientists, and lawyers what they would consider the most important single treaty or international agreement of the last two Continue reading →