BLOCKADE

Sam Kuivenhoven is a PhD candidate contributing to BLOCKADE at the University of Amsterdam. His research examines Japan’s anticipation of blockade before and during the Second World War, situating it within the global history of economic warfare. He is particularly interested in how the experience and interpretation of the First World War shaped Japanese strategic thought. Transnational learning from Europe convinced Japanese planners that the next war would hinge as much on food supply, industrial substitution, and mass mobilization as on conventional military strength. This concern drove Japan’s imperial development of Manchuria in the 1930s as a laboratory for autarky, while wartime policies of rationing, food control, and synthetic production deepened under the Allied blockade. His project thus connects military strategy with the social and economic histories of households, companies, and bureaucracies, highlighting the interplay between vulnerability, resilience, and coercion in modern warfare.

Before beginning his PhD, Sam completed a Master of Arts in Japanese Studies at Leiden University and an MPhil in Japanese Studies at the University of Cambridge. His earlier research focused on Edo-period popular literature and prints, especially sources that reflected Dutch-Japanese contact and the circulation of knowledge. He has also contributed to a major transcription and translation project on early modern population registers for Japan Past & Present (UCLA/Waseda). He was also a recipient of an Isaac Alfred Ailion Fellowship grant at the Leiden University Libraries, where he worked on archeological material from Leiden’s Special Collections.