In World War II, Britain was fighting for its survival against German aerial bombardment. Yet Britain was importing dyes from Germany at the same time. This sounds curious, to put it mildly. How can two countries at war with each other also be trading goods?
Examples of this abound, actually. Britain also traded with its enemies for almost all of World War I. India and Pakistan conducted trade with each other during the First Kashmir War, from 1947 to 1949, and during the India-Pakistan War of 1965. Croatia and then-Yugoslavia traded with each other while fighting in 1992.
“States do in fact trade with their enemies during wars,” says MIT political scientist Mariya Grinberg. “There is a lot of variation in which products get traded, and in which wars, and there are differences in how long trade lasts into a war. But it does happen.”
Indeed, as Grinberg has found, state leaders tend to calculate whether trade can give them an advantage by boosting their own economies while not supplying their enemies with anything too useful in the near term.
“At its heart, wartime trade is all about the tradeoff between military benefits and economic costs,” Grinberg says. “Severing trade denies the enemy access to your products that could increase their military capabilities, but it also incurs a cost to you because you’re losing trade and neutral states could take over your long-term market share.” Therefore, many countries try trading with their wartime foes.
Grinberg explores this topic in a groundbreaking new book, the first one on the subject, “Trade in War: Economic Cooperation Across Enemy Lines,” published this month by Cornell University Press. It is also the first book by Grinberg, an assistant professor of political science at MIT.
Calculating time and utility
“Trade in War” has its roots in research Grinberg started as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, where she noticed that wartime trade was a phenomenon not yet incorporated into theories of state behavior.
Grinberg wanted to learn about it comprehensively, so, as she quips, “I did what academics usually do: I went to the work of historians and said, ‘Historians, what have you got for me?’”
Modern wartime trading began during the Crimean War, which pitted Russia against France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and other allies. Before the war’s start in 1854, France had paid for many Russian goods that could not be shipped because ice in the Baltic Sea was late to thaw. To rescue its produce, France then persuaded Britain and Russia to adopt “neutral rights,” codified in the 1856 Declaration of Paris, which formalized the idea that goods in wartime could be shipped via neutral parties (sometimes acting as intermediaries for warring countries).
... continue reading