With the multiple-award-winning War Plan Orange, Ed Miller showed himself to be a highly original researcher of the origins of the Pacific War. His new book, Bankrupting the Enemy: the US Financial Siege of Japan Before Pearl Harbor, adds to that status. Admittedly, this is very different from War Plan Orange. No military history this time, but a detailed analysis of an almost neglected aspect of pre-World War II Japan–US relations: the fateful decision to invoke the ‘obscure’ Section 5(b) of the Trading with the Enemy Act (a relic from World War I), a paragraph that empowered then president Roosevelt to paralyse or ‘freeze’ the dollar holdings of foreign countries, whether enemy or not (apparently, the latter was included to be able to sanction Austria–Hungary, for example, which was not yet at war with the United States at the time). The logic was as follows: once deprived of US dollars, the key reserve currency par excellence, Japan would be brought ‘to its senses, not its knees’. However ‘inspired’ Roosevelt's original intention may have been, ambitious bureaucrats decided otherwise. Dean Acheson effectively rejected repeated demands from Japanese diplomats and agents to unfreeze dollars in order to reopen the direly needed trade. Eventually, the dollar freeze deprived Japan of assets vital to its survival and thus became, more than commodity embargoes, the most deadly sanction. Miller rightfully speaks of Japan's ‘strangulation’. It buttressed Japan's choice to embark on a war that was destined to be lost  …

Many works concentrate on the economic aspects of the prelude to the Pacific War, but the financial aspects seem conspicuously neglected. Or is there a reason for that? As Miller explains in the crucial ‘Sources and Technical Notes’,

I regard it as especially fortunate that Miller stresses the complexities and uncontrollability of bureaucratic politics. Contrary to often-held Japanese public opinion (eloquently stated, for example, by Kido Koichi immediately after the War, see as well pp. 242–3), there did not exist a linear and sustained American strategy of bringing Japan to war. Indeed, plans for war with Japan existed since the early twentieth century (after Japan's victory over Russia, and especially after its meddling in China's domestic affairs), but they were largely theoretical. Instead, it was the partially distorted vision of Japan's helplessness, reinforced by reports about Japanese energy vulnerability, that blinded policy makers with respect to their policies' accuracy. The book helpfully lists US forecasts of Japan's international ‘bankruptcy’ (pp. 54–8) and explains that several administrations failed in their objective of deterring Japan from attacking. The disastrous consequences are well known.

As every review demands, I should also highlight some minor annoyances. Bankrupting the Enemy is not so novel when it comes to the issue of the vitality of exports of raw silk to America: that issue has at least partly been covered by Haru Matsukata Reischauer's Samurai and Silk: A Japanese and American Heritage (Harvard University Press, 1988). Some readers, especially those with less interest in economic or industrial history, might find the description of several production processes (e.g. pp. 18ff.) too elaborate. Researchers of Japanese history might object to the neglect of Japanese language sources (but then again, this is a study of the formation of the policy of the dollar freeze, not of the Japanese reaction). However, these are all very minor issues, and the reader should not be bothered by them.

This is a great book, and it will be of interest to researchers and laymen, and everybody interested in the origins of the Pacific War, Japanese economic history and US policy history.