E MBARGOES AND S ANCTIONS

Jerald A. Combs

For most of America's history, the word "embargo" was used to refer specifically to a prohibition on the departure of ships or exports from a nation's own ports, whereas the words "boycott" and "nonimportation" were used to describe prohibitions of imports or ship entries, and "nonintercourse" was used to describe a total prohibition of trade with a nation. But the word "embargo" also was used generically to refer to all stoppages of trade.

Since World War II, the growth of modern economic institutions and relations has afforded governments, especially rich and powerful ones like that of the United States, an arsenal of commercial weapons extending far beyond an outright stoppage of trade, including denial of aid and loans, commodity dumping, import and export limitations, revocation of most-favored-nation (MFN) trade status, and freezing assets. As those means increased, the word "embargo" seemed less applicable to the wide range of economic coercive measures that the United States, the United Nations, and other entities were using to accomplish noneconomic goals. The preferred term now is "sanctions." In eighteenth-century Europe, an embargo was generally a prelude to a formal declaration of war. A civil embargo prohibited a nation's own ships from leaving port; a hostile embargo affected all ships in the port, foreign or domestic. Neutral ships caught in the embargo might even be forced into the service of the belligerent nation. The right to do this was called the power of angary. By imposing an embargo before declaring war, a nation could keep friendly ships from falling into the hands of the enemy and hold enemy ships hostage for future contingencies.

European powers rarely resorted to an embargo as a weapon in itself rather than as a prelude to war, although there were two exceptions to this in the sixteenth century: a French grain embargo against Spain and a threatened Turkish wheat embargo against Venice. In most cases, European nations had little incentive to consider a broader use of embargoes because geographical proximity made conventional military attacks easy and effective. Besides, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries constituted the age of mercantilism, in which people believed that national power depended upon exports exceeding imports. Thus, most diplomats expected an embargo of long duration to hurt the embargoing nation more than its enemy. An extreme example of this philosophy was Great Britain's famous blockade of Napoleonic France, which was not designed to starve France but to compel it to accept British imports or receive no trade at all.

See also B LOCKADES ; C ONTINENTAL S YSTEM ; E CONOMIC P OLICY AND T HEORY ; F REEDOM OF THE S EAS ; N AVAL D IPLOMACY ; O IL