The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe

The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe
Author: Daniel Chirot
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1989
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780520076402

Reaching back centuries, this study makes a convincing case for very deep roots of current Eastern European backwardness. Its conclusions are suggestive for comparativists studying other parts of the world, and useful to those who want to understand contemporary Eastern Europe's past. Like the rest of the world except for that unique part of the West which has given us a false model of what was "normal," Eastern Europe developed slowly. The weight of established class relations, geography, lack of technological innovation, and wars kept the area from growing richer. In the nineteenth century the West exerted a powerful influence, but it was political more than economic. Nationalism and the creation of newly independent aspiring nation-states then began to shape national economies, often in unfavorable ways. One of this book's most important lessons is that while economics may limit the freedom of action of political players, it does not determine political outcomes. The authors offer no simple explanations but rather a theoretically complex synthesis that demonstrates the interaction of politics and economics.

Backwardness and Modernization

Backwardness and Modernization
Author: Jacek Kochanowicz
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780754659051

The subject of this book is the economic backwardness of Poland and Eastern Europe in the modern era. The studies in the first part analyse various aspects of the region's economic and social history in the period from the 16th to the 20th centuries; those in the second part deal with the change following the fall of state socialism. Professor Kochanowicz here argues that, for understanding the present, it is necessary to take into consideration historical legacies.

Inventing Eastern Europe

Inventing Eastern Europe
Author: Larry Wolff
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 444
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780804727020

Wolff explores how Western thinkers contributed to defining and characterizing Eastern Europe as half-civilized and barbaric.

Explaining Economic Backwardness

Explaining Economic Backwardness
Author: Anna Sosnowska
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-06-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789633862919

This monograph is about an exciting episode in the intellectual history of Europe: the vigorous debate among leading Polish historians on the sources of the economic development and non-development, including the origins of economic divisions within Europe. The work covers nearly fifty years of this debate between the publication of two pivotal works in 1947 and 1994. Anna Sosnowska provides an insightful interpretation of how local and generational experience shaped the notions of post-1945 Polish historians about Eastern European backwardness, and how their debate influenced Western historical sociology, social theories of development and dependency in peripheral areas, and the image of Eastern Europe in Western, Marxist-inspired social science. Although created under the adverse conditions of state socialism and censorship, this body of scholarship had an important repercussion in international social science of the post-war period, contributing an emphasis on international comparisons, as well as a stress on social theory and explanations. Sosnowska's analysis also helps to understand current differences that lead to conflicts between Europe's richest and economically most developed core and its southern and eastern peripheries. The historians she studies also investigated analogies between paths in Eastern Europe and regions of West Africa, Latin America and East Asia.

East Central Europe in the Modern World

East Central Europe in the Modern World
Author: Andrew C. Janos
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2000
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780804746885

A study of East Central Europe and its place in the modern world. Combining narrative with analysis, it presents the past and present of East Central Europe in the larger context of the political and economic history of the continent.

History Derailed

History Derailed
Author: Ivan T. Berend
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2003
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520245253

Historian Iván Berend turns his attention to Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th century, a turbulent period. Extending up to World War I, the period contained the seeds of developments and crises that continue to haunt the region today.

The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700

The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700
Author: Irina Livezeanu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 722
Release: 2017-03-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351863428

Covering territory from Russia in the east to Germany and Austria in the west, The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700 explores the origins and evolution of modernity in this turbulent region. This book applies fresh critical approaches to major historical controversies and debates, expanding the study of a region that has experienced persistent and profound change and yet has long been dominated by narrowly nationalist interpretations. Written by an international team of contributors that reflects the increasing globalization and pluralism of East Central European studies, chapters discuss key themes such as economic development, the relationship between religion and ethnicity, the intersection between culture and imperial, national, wartime, and revolutionary political agendas, migration, women’s and gender history, ideologies and political movements, the legacy of communism, and the ways in which various states in East Central Europe deployed and were formed by the politics of memory and commemoration. This book uses new methodologies in order to fundamentally reshape perspectives on the development of East Central Europe over the past three centuries. Transnational and comparative in approach, this volume presents the latest research on the social, cultural, political and economic history of modern East Central Europe, providing an analytical and comprehensive overview for all students of this region.

The Socialist Good Life

The Socialist Good Life
Author: Cristofer Scarboro
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2020-06-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253047803

“First-class, rigorously researched, richly documented, and thought-provoking” essays on the consumer experience in socialist Eastern Europe (Graham H. Roberts, author of Material Culture in Russia and the USSR). As communist regimes denigrated Western countries for widespread unemployment and consumer excess, socialist Eastern European states simultaneously legitimized their power through their apparent ability to satisfy consumers’ needs. Moving beyond binaries of production and consumption, the essays collected here examine the lessons consumption studies can offer about ethnic and national identity and the role of economic expertise in shaping consumer behavior. From Polish VCRs to Ukrainian fashion boutiques, tropical fruits in the GDR to cinemas in Belgrade, The Socialist Good Life explores what consumption means in a worker state where communist ideology emphasizes collective needs over individual pleasures.