The Economic Cold War: America, Britain, and East-West Trade, 1948–1963. By Ian Jackson. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. ix, 239

Alan S. Milward

The Journal of Economic History, 2002, vol. 62, issue 2, 636-637

Abstract: Since Gunnar Adler-Karlsson in 1968 published the first attempt at a comprehensive study of the West's “economic warfare” against the Soviet Bloc (Western Economic Warfare, 1947–1967: A Case Study in Foreign Economic Policy. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell), there has been a thin but persistent stream of studies covering the same subject. Adler-Karlsson's title was exaggerated. His theme was one instrument of Western commercial policy, namely the embargo on exportation of so-called “strategic goods” to the Soviet Bloc and China. Because almost all documentation on this subject was still secret when he wrote, his approach was quantitative, relying on the measurement of differences in trend over twenty years between Western exports to the Eastern bloc and to other destinations. Unrefined though this approach was, it remains the one book on the subject which proceeds from trade statistics to policy. The opening of documentary sources has reversed that process. Diplomatic historians have used government records to show how wide were the differences, and sometimes the practices, among Western countries in implementing the embargoes. Their most salient theme has been the demonstration from written records that the decisions about which goods to embargo were genuinely collective and that, in particular, the influence of Britain as an intermediary was surprisingly important in shaping the form and overall impact of these policies. However unilateralist the American hegemon may now be, in the 1950s it was not so. The sustained growth of Europe's economic strength was vital to America's own security; trade embargoes which threatened that growth were not enforced. On the basis of this documentation political scientists have been able to formulate theories of commercial “warfare,” of which Michael Mastanduno's Economic Containment: CoCom and the Politics of East-West Trade (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) has received the most acclaim.

Date: 2002
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