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Fleets have the ability to affect an adversary’s use of the seas for transportation. Nations have in numerous occasions exercised this power in order to ravage their opponent’s trade in times of conflict with the purpose of diminishing their military might. Great naval thinkers like Mahan and Corbett have described this use of seapower during conflicts in great depth but theories regarding the use of seapower to affect a nation’s peacetime economy in order to achieve limited political goals is lacking. This thesis attempts to analyze the use of seapower in the form of economic sanctions to answer the question; “How is seapower exercised in economic sanctions?” in order to remedy this.

The results show that seapower is mostly used to halt the inward flow of goods to a nation and general sanctions are more often used than sanctions targeting specific commodities. What these sanctions aim to achieve is often to limit military capacity and to disrupt military aggression. This thesis comes to the conclusions that a force capable of operating anywhere on the globe for an extended period of time is vital for the effectiveness of economic sanctions, seapower is a necessary part of the enforcement of economic sanctions and that naval theory has been too preoccupied with large scale conflicts and neglected the use of seapower to achieve limited political goals with economic measures during times of peace.