Agriculture in ancient Greece was subject to ravaging of the crops by enemy armies. This was done to loot a valuable item, to starve the victims, and to intimidate and deter them.
Crusades 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. He envisions a fleet of 40–50
galleys to enforce a blockade on trade between Europe and Egypt. He sees the trade as helping Egypt in two ways: it obtains war
materiel (iron, tin, timber, oil) from Europe and dues on goods brought in via the
Red Sea from Asia for trade to Europe. 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. That may also make it unable to afford more
slave soldiers imported via the
Black Sea slave trade.
Seven Years' War During the
Seven Years' War of 1756 to 1763, the
Kingdom of Prussia occupied Saxony and used its mint to
debase both the Saxon and Polish-Lithuanian currencies.
American Civil War 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. The
Confederate economy proved surprisingly vulnerable.
Guerrilla warfare in the American Civil War was supported by a large fraction of the Confederate population that provided food, horses, and hiding places for official and unofficial Confederate units. The
Union response was to ravage the local economy, as in the
Burning Raid of 1864 and on a bigger scale,
Sherman's March to the Sea. Before the war, most passenger and freight traffic had moved by water through the river system or coastal ports.
Confederate railroads were already inadequate and suffered much damage during the fighting. Travel became far more difficult. Having crippled Confederate foreign trade by imposing the
Union blockade with its blue-water fleet, the
Union Navy built a riverine
Mississippi River Squadron of small powerful gunboats to take control of the main southern rivers. 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. Both sides burned bridges, tore up railroad tracks, and cut telegraph lines. They effectively ruined the infrastructure of the Confederacy. soldiers destroying telegraph poles and railroads in
Georgia, 1864] The Confederacy in 1861 had 297 towns and cities with a total population of 835,000 people, 162 of which were at one point occupied by Union forces, involving a total population of 681,000 people. In practically every case, infrastructure was damaged, and trade and economic activity was disrupted for a while. Eleven cities were severely damaged by war action, including Atlanta, Charleston, Columbia, and Richmond. The rate of damage in smaller towns was much lower, with severe damage to 45 out of a total of 830. Farms went into disrepair, and the prewar stock of horses, mules, and cattle was much depleted; 40% of the South's livestock was killed. The South's farms were not highly mechanized, but the value of farm implements and machinery in the 1860 census was $81 million and had been reduced by 40% by 1870. The transportation
infrastructure lay in ruins, with little railroad or
riverboat service available to move crops or animals to market. Railroad mileage was located mostly in rural areas, and over two thirds of the South's rails, bridges, rail yards, repair shops, and rolling stock were in areas reached by Union armies, which systematically destroyed what they could. Even in untouched areas, the lack of maintenance and repair, the absence of new equipment, the heavy overuse, and the relocation of equipment by the Confederacy from remote areas to the war zone ensured that the system would be ruined at war's end. The enormous cost of the Confederate war effort took a high toll on the South's economic infrastructure. The direct costs to the Confederacy in
human capital, government expenditures, and physical destruction totaled perhaps $3.3 billion. By 1865, the
Confederate dollar was worthless because of high
inflation, and people in the South had to resort to
bartering for goods or services to use scarce Union dollars. With the
emancipation of the slaves, the entire economy of the South had to be rebuilt. 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. The disruption of finance, trade, services, and transportation nodes severely disrupted the pre-war agricultural system and impoverished the entire region for generations.
World War I 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. Germany could not find enough food since its younger farmers were all in the army, and the desperate Germans were eating turnips by the winter of 1916–17. US shipping was sometimes seized, and Washington protested. The British paid monetary compensation so that the American protests would not escalate into serious trouble.
World War II 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. The British Royal Navy
again blockaded Germany although with much more difficulty than in 1914. The
US Navy, especially its submarines, cut off shipments of oil and food to
Japan. 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. As the Allied air forces grew, they mounted the
oil campaign of World War II to deprive Germany of fuel. Neutral countries continue to trade with both sides. The Royal Navy could not stop land trade, so the allies made other efforts to cut off sales to Germany of critical minerals such as
tungsten,
chromium,
mercury and
iron ore from Spain, Portugal, Turkey,
Sweden and elsewhere. Germany wanted
Spain to enter the war but they could not agree to terms. To keep Germany and Spain apart, Britain used a
carrot-and-stick approach. Britain provided oil and closely monitored Spain's export trade. It outbid Germany for the tungsten, whose price soared, and by 1943, tungsten was Spain's biggest export-earner. Britain's cautious treatment of Spain brought conflict with the more aggressive American policy. In the
Wolfram Crisis of 1944 Washington cut off oil supplies but then agreed with London's requests to resume oil shipments. Portugal feared a German-Spanish invasion, but when that became unlikely in 1944, it virtually joined the Allies. == Cold War ==