The term total war suggests three different meanings: Ordinary usage implies the maximal mobilization of society for war. Quite a different yardstick is the optimal allocation of national resources in wartime among the various military and civilian sectors in the pursuit of objectives that are internally consistent and socially advantageous. A third connotation of total war is the disavowal of moral and legal restraint in the pursuit of military success. Britain's blockade of Germany in World War I is approached from all three of these angles in this chapter. The focus here is not on facts but rather on interpretation and on the logic of events. Two related issues are examined: the role of blockade strategy in the origins of World War I and the adequacy of the German domestic response to the effects of blockade, particularly with regard to shortfalls in food supply.

Agency theory (or “principal-agent theory”) is part of the “new institutional economics.” It concerns the problems facing a “principal” in getting an “agent” to do his or her bidding, for example, an employer and a workman, a government and its citizens, a client and a lawyer. In order to devise the right incentives, the principal needs to know how difficult the task is for the agent and how well the agent performs. The difficulty arises from “imperfect information,” which is self-explanatory, and from “bounded rationality,” which alludes to the mental and cognitive limitations of individuals (and organizations) attempting to evaluate complicated and uncertain courses of action, including the problem of what further information should be acquired.