Project description
The hidden impact of wartime blockades
Throughout the world wars, blockades were a powerful weapon of economic warfare. By cutting off access to food, oil, capital, and even information, belligerents sought to force their enemies to surrender. Yet, the true impact of these blockades remains unclear, with existing research offering contradictory insights. As new blockades reshape global conflicts today, understanding their historical role is more important than ever. The ERC-funded BLOCKADE project aims to fill this gap by investigating how blockades influenced the course, outcome, and aftermath of the world wars. By integrating diverse perspectives and disciplines, the project will uncover the shared experiences and long-term consequences of blockades, thereby shedding light on their role in shaping wartime and postwar societies.
Objective
The main aim of BLOCKADE is to investigate how blockades shaped the course, outcome and aftermath of the world wars. In both wars, belligerents sought to blockade their enemies, cutting them off from vital resources such as food, oil, information and capital to hasten their defeat. Existing research is contradictory and fragmentary, leaving us in the dark as to the scope and the effects of blockades, just as the world is confronted with new blockades.
Our hypothesis is that understanding the blockades is critical to the era of the world wars (ca. 1900-1960). The blockades affected societies the world over, testing their resilience and vulnerability. They produced new forms of violence and humanitarian care, prompted innovation and learning, and had integrative and disintegrative effects on wartime societies, alliances and the world order. The project’s ambitious approach transcends the traditional fixation on western Europe and integrates actors long seen as ‘peripheral’. It connects the disparate histories of the First and Second World Wars in a single explanatory frame by uncovering the shared generational experiences and learning processes related to blockades, allowing us to assess their impact on the wars and the peace that followed them. The high gain promised by this project comes with the high risk that we might fail to separate the impact of blockades from other effects of warfare; but it is a risk we believe we can mitigate via innovative methodology and careful source analysis.
BLOCKADE requires input from a range of academic disciplines (economics and economic history, international history, cultural and war studies, statistical and digital analysis and many languages). Only the synergy resulting from combining the four PI and the larger team’s different qualifications and research methodologies will realise the potential for high scientific gains with the necessary complexity and range.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC-SYG - HORIZON ERC Synergy GrantsHost institution
7491 Trondheim
Norway