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“The” Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe
The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe
Author: Daniel Chirot
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 1989
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 9780520076402
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Explaining Economic Backwardness
Author: Anna Sosnowska
Publisher: Central European University Press
Published: 2019-06-12
Total Pages: 372
ISBN-13: 9637326316
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Backwardness and Modernization: Poland and Eastern Europe in the 16th-20th Centuries
Author: Jacek Kochanowicz
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-31
Total Pages: 295
ISBN-13: 1351125788
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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, such as the nature of peasant economics, the character of economic evolution, and the ambiguity of social and economic relations between Poland and "the West". The second part deals with the change following the fall of state socialism. Papers in this part argue that, for understanding the present, it is necessary to take into consideration historical legacies. It is also important to look at the process of this recent change comparatively, both within Eastern Europe and comparing this region with other parts of the world. Professor Kochanowicz's contention in these essays is that the so-called transformation has had to cope not only with the effects of state socialism, but also with a much longer legacy of backwardness.
Inventing Eastern Europe
Author: Larry Wolff
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 444
ISBN-13: 9780804727020
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Wolff explores how Western thinkers contributed to defining and characterizing Eastern Europe as half-civilized and barbaric.
The Making of Eastern Europe
Author: Philip Longworth
Publisher: Springer
Published: 1992-08-18
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 134922202X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Why has the collapse of Communism resulted in so much disappointment for the hopeful millions of Eastern Europe? In this original and provocative book Philip Longworth argues that their predicament is only partly due to the imposition of the Soviet system but rather they are the heirs of misfortune which dates back centuries. In exploring the origins of current problems, this sweeping history ranges from the present day to the time of Constantine the Great, from the Urals to the Mediterranean and the Baltic, and emphasises culture and society, as well as politics and economics. The resulting analysis provides the crucial, and until now much-needed, long-term background to the difficulties now facing Eastern Europe. This new perspective and the insight it brings will improve our understanding of this complex region and be of immense value to all who want to understand Eastern Europe's past and present.
East Central Europe in the Modern World
Author: Andrew C. Janos
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 516
ISBN-13: 9780804746885
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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
Author: Ivan T. Berend
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 416
ISBN-13: 0520245253
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
A History of Eastern Europe
Author: Robert Bideleux
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-04-10
Total Pages: 726
ISBN-13: 113471985X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change is a wide-ranging single volume history of the "lands between", the lands which have lain between Germany, Italy, and the Tsarist and Soviet empires. Bideleux and Jeffries examine the problems that have bedevilled this troubled region during its imperial past, the interwar period, under fascism, under communism, and since 1989. While mainly focusing on the modern era and on the effects of ethnic nationalism, fascism and communism, the book also offers original, striking and revisionist coverage of: * ancient and medieval times * the Hussite Revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation * the legacies of Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire and the Hapsburg Empire * the rise and decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth * the impact of the region's powerful Russian and Germanic neighbours * rival concepts of "Central" and "Eastern" Europe * the 1920s land reforms and the 1930s Depression. Providing a thematic historical survey and analysis of the formative processes of change which have played the paramount roles in shaping the development of the region, A History of Eastern Europe itself will play a paramount role in the studies of European historians.
