Economic warfare
[citation needed] The concept of economic warfare is most applicable to total war, which involves not only the armed forces of enemy countries but also mobilized war-economies.
Policies and measures in economic warfare may include blockade, blacklisting, preclusive purchasing, rewards and the capturing or the control of enemy assets or supply lines.
In his Book on the Recovery of the Holy Land, Fidentius of Padua provides prescriptions for economic warfare to be waged against the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt in furtherance of the Crusades.
If the spice trade were deflected from the Red Sea to Mongol Persia, Egypt would be deprived of customs duties and lose export markets because of the reduction in shipping.
[7] Union forces in the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865 had the challenge of occupying and controlling the 11 states of the Confederacy, a vast area larger than Western Europe.
Land transportation was contested, as Confederate supporters tried to block shipments of munitions, reinforcements and supplies through West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee to Union forces in the south.
Having lost their enormous investment in slaves, white planters had minimal capital to pay freedmen workers to bring in crops.
As a result, a system of sharecropping developed in which landowners broke up large plantations and rented small lots to the freedmen and their families.
The main feature of the Southern economy changed from an elite minority of landed gentry slaveholders to a tenant farming agriculture system.
[17] The British used their greatly-superior Royal Navy to cause a tight blockade of Germany and a close monitoring of shipments to neutral countries to prevent them from being transshipped to there.
[20] Clear examples of economic warfare occurred during World War II when the Allied powers followed such policies to deprive the Axis economies of critical resources.
In turn, Germany attempted to damage the Allied war effort via submarine warfare: the sinking of transport ships carrying supplies, raw materials, and essential war-related items such as food and oil.
[22] As the Allied air forces grew, they mounted an Oil campaign of World War II to deprive Germany of fuel.
The Royal Navy could not stop land trade, so the allies made other effort to cut off sales to Germany of critical minerals such as tungsten, chromium, mercury and iron ore from Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Sweden and elsewhere.
Deployment of herbicides and defoliants served the dual purpose of thinning jungle trails to prevent ambushes and destroying crop fields in regions where the MNLA was active to deprive them of potential sources of food.
[29][30][31] As the British did in Malaya, the goal of the U.S. was to defoliate rural/forested land, depriving guerrillas of food and concealment and clearing sensitive areas such as around base perimeters.
