This Decade’s Must-Read Is a 1939 Guide to Waging Economic War

Inside a locked room at the UK’s National Archives, I am alone with a battered, red-bound book carrying a warning on its cover: “TO BE KEPT UNDER LOCK AND KEY.” An oversized security camera on the ceiling and partially opaque internal windows make it feel as if others can see me better than I can see them. A librarian has ushered me into this high-security invigilation room to view the 1939 edition of The Handbook of Economic Warfare, not because the book is still top secret but because it is so popular that staff don’t want me wandering off with it.

The handbook’s advice is almost 90 years old. The front cover is peeling, its spine frayed. It was written in a different world, when the Nazi threat loomed over Europe and Britain dominated global shipping. Over the past decade, though, beginning with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, government officials, think-tankers, historians and journalists have all traveled to Kew, a leafy corner of southwest London, to consult the weathered document. On the day I visit its current home, the 1970s brutalist building that houses the National Archives, the handbook has also been reserved by another person, although we never actually meet.