Russian economics and Royal Navy in the Baltic

[SMK-at-work]

I remember a while back there was some discussion on the Royal Navy deploying to the Baltic. I just received a couple of 1920's era works on Russia and the economic war, and found this bit to be interesting -

In 1912 the Russian ambassador asked the British what their plans would be in the Baltic in even of war with Germany. The British response was that they had no intention of entering the baltic "mousetrap" (Lord Edward Grey to Sazanov) - they feared that if the fleet was in the Baltic then Germany would pressure Denmark to close the straights behind them - even declaring war to do so if necessary.

As a matter of interest also 1/3rd of Russian overseas trade came through the Russian Baltic ports.

Sweden continued to trade with Russia, but the British pressured Sweden (and other nations) to reduce or at least limit trade with Germany - Sweden figured that if the British wanted "free trade" with Russia through Sweden then they would have to put up with "free trade" for Sweden with whoever the Swedes wanted to trade with (ie incl Germany).

Whereas other neutral nations allowed British inspectors in their ports to check cargoes (Netherlands, Denmark and Norway all did so) the Swedes actually made it a criminal offence to co-operate with any such activities involving foreign powers (ie Britain) on Swedish soil.

The net result was that the blockade of Germany became a blockade of Russia as well.

Still a long way to go with these books - the language is a bit dates and sometimes not as clear as if I was edumicated in the 20's!! [8|]

[Raynald]

Interesting.
 
Note that despite the British inspectors, all the neutrals increased considerably their imports and sold it to Germany. That's why the blocade became really effective only once the USA entered the war.

[SMK-at-work]

I don't know that that is true - the british limited the neutrals to levels of "contraband" imports that they had before the war precisely to stop them having any surplus to sell to germany - of course substitution and probably high prices paid by the Germans almost certainly meant that a good portion of hteir "normal" useage went to Germany anyway, but generally the level of imports did not, AFAIK, increase much thought those that were so controlled.

Do you have actual tonnage figures for neutral imports?

[hjaco]

I will just interfere with this.

What probably isn't included in these figures are the fact that Netherlands being an old trading empire by tradition imported large quantities of food and other stuff to sell in Europe. Netherlands is a country with a fairly developed agriculture so they were self dependent.

Denmark exported large quantities primarily to the evil empire south of us because we didn't dare to way no which didn't require oceanic traffic as the production was primarily in Jutland being land connected to Germany.

I have no data on this though.

[SMK-at-work]

WW1 was a kind of strange crossover between the mores of earlier times, and total war of the 20th century - for example Russia kept trading with Germany for the first 3 years of the war!!  Admitedly the trade was much curtailed - the total for 3 years was about 60 million roubles, or about 10% of total trade in 1913.
 
Russian imports from Germany for that time included mainly chemicals, metals and machine tools.  It wasn't until the start of 1917 that Russia "finally" went to a total nont-trade policy.
 
Even the French kept trading for a while - I remember reading many years ago that the French may have sold shell cases to Germany until 1915!!

Russian attempts to keep trade open without letting "contraband reach enemy were usually fairly superficial - involving "diplomatic guarantees" by neutral nations that goods sent to them would not be onsold.  However there was nothign to prevent substitution - eg Sweden buys russian food, then sells Swedish-produced food to Germany and uses the Russian fod to feed itself (I dont' know that thsi happened, but it is the kind of thing that people were concerned about).
 
One illustration tho - Russia sold hemp to Norway, which used it to make fishing nets.  The Russians secured a gaurantee from Norway that it would not onsell the hemp, nor any products made from the hemp, nor any fish caught with nets made from the hemp.  I have no idea whether thsi worked or not, but the Russains felt Norway was geneally friendly to the allies and they "trusted" them by not putting so many obstacles in eth way of Norway as other states.  total trade with Norway was miniscule - in the order of 1-2 million roubles/year.
 
It's a fascinating read....if a little dry!!
 
 

[SMK-at-work]

there's an American article written in 1915 at http://net.lib.byu.edu/~rdh7/wwi/comment/Clapp/ClappTC.htm that deals with the British blockade, and how it affected US trade - it's very interesting reading if you're into the economic aspects of the war.