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likely to be characterized by civilian victimization as a means to coerce noncombatants to stop (or deter them
from) supporting an enemy government or a rebel group. Second, wars in which the original political
objectives of the belligerents escalate also tend to become long, costly affairs. States resist more feverishly the
more they are asked to forfeit as the price of peace. Expanding war aims may also trigger third-party
intervention in the war, and make negotiated settlements harder to achieve. Third, wars in which a belligerent
aims to conquer, annex, and colonize a piece of its opponent’s territory tend to lead to civilian victimization
because the attacker may view the enemy’s population residing there as untrustworthy and likely to rebel in
the future. The potential costs of not removing them may be judged to be too dangerous to allow them to
remain in place, and violence is thus employed to eliminate the threatening group from the area.
This paper tests the liberal democracy and military costs explanations for civilian victimization by
examining the British and German starvation blockades of the First World War. In the case of the British
naval blockade of Germany, I argue that British leaders decided to target enemy civilians as they came to
perceive that the costs and duration of the war would be far greater than they had originally believed, and
because they thought that denying food to noncombatants might help win the war. Britain initially instituted
a distant blockade of the North Sea in August 1914, but in adherence with the 1909 Declaration of London,
allowed goods not useful for warfare consigned to parties in Germany but carried in neutral bottoms to
neutral ports to reach their destinations. As it became apparent that the war would last much longer than
originally anticipated, the British eliminated these loopholes and attempted to deny food to the German and
Austrian populations. This starvation blockade constricted the food supply and lowered the caloric intake of
ordinary Germans below 1,000 per day in 1917. The malnutrition that resulted led to over 800,000 excess
deaths in the Central Powers over the course of the war.
The choice to wage unrestricted submarine warfare evolved gradually over time in Germany, and the
calculations of German leaders largely mirrored those of their British counterparts. German naval officers,
frustrated by their inability to force a decisive fleet action with the British Grand Fleet, began to push for
unlimited use of U-boats against British and neutral commerce in November 1914. But the admirals were
repeatedly rebuffed by Kaiser Wilhelm II and his chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, on the
grounds that such a move would provoke neutral countries—particularly the United States—to join the ranks
of Germany’s foes. The voices of military leaders became harder to ignore the longer the stalemate
continued, however, and Bethmann was finally overwhelmed in January 1917. While the decision to resort to
unrestricted submarine warfare has been criticized in retrospect as foolhardy and based on implausible
assumptions, after the wave of setbacks suffered by the Central Powers in 1916, the material advantages of
the Entente, and the prospect of the situation worsening in 1917, Germany’s leaders viewed a leap in the dark
that—if successful—held a possibility of victory (but if not meant almost certain defeat) as preferable to a
continuation of the status quo in which the Central Powers would slowly but surely be ground down and
defeated.
Regime type was largely irrelevant to these decisions to wage war on enemy populations. If anything,
decision-makers in Germany—the more autocratic of the two countries according to most measures—made
more references to public opinion than their British counterparts, and that opinion overwhelmingly favored
unlimited submarine warfare. The liberal beliefs of the British elite and people quickly fell by the wayside and
presented no obstacle to starving the German people. The main constraint on British policy, rather, was the
fear of alienating the United States by cutting off German trade too rapidly. The British public periodically
clamored for a tightening of the blockade, and argued that it should be maintained even after the armistice in
order to compel Germany to accept the harsh Allied peace terms. One does not get the impression, however,
that the British government simply did the bidding of its constituents. Rather, officials in both countries
followed the course they believed most likely to subdue the enemy while conserving their own costs.
The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. After briefly defining the dependent variable of the
study—civilian victimization—I sketch the competing liberal and military costs arguments. I then present
Convention