Jacek Kochanowicz - Backwardness and Modernization: Poland and Eastern Europe in the 16th-20th Centuries

BACKWARDNESS

Family Forms in Historic Europe, ed. Richard Wall, Jean Robin and Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983

Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, ed. Forrest D. Colburn. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1989

The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages Until the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Daniel Chirot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989

Limpresa. Industria Commercio Banca. Secoli XIIIXVIII, a cura di Simonetta Cavaciocchi. Firenze: LeMonnier, 1991

Finland and Poland in the Russian Empire: A Comparative Study, ed. Michael Branch, Janet Hartley and Antoni Mqczak. London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, 1995

Economie appliquee, tome LV, no. 2. Paris, 2002

Revised and translated version of Wie westlich ist Polen?, in Transit 21. Wien, 2001, pp. 5575

MODERNIZATION

Stabilization and Privatization in Poland: An Economic Evaluation of the Shock Therapy Program, ed. Kazimierz Z. Poznanski. Boston/Dordrecht/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993

Intricate Links: Democratization and Market Reforms in Latin America and Eastern Europe, ed. Joan M. Nelson and contributors. New Brunswick/Oxford: Transaction Publishers, 1994

Studia Historiae Oeconomicae 23. Poznan, 1998

East Central Europe/LEurope du Centre-Est. Eine wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 27:1. Budapest, 2000

Long-Term Structural Changes in Transforming Central & Eastern Europe (The 1990s), ed. Ivan T. Berend. Sudosteuropa-Studie 57. Munchen: Sudosteuropa-Gesellschaft, 1997

Social Research, volume 64, no. 4. New York, 1997

Liberalization and its Consequences: A Comparative Perspective on Latin America and Eastern Europe, ed. Werner Baer and Joseph L. Love. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2000

This volume contains xii + 322 pages

The essays collected in this volume were written and published in various places between 1983 and 2000 and they cover a period stretching from the sixteenth century to the present. A few words are necessary to explain what unites them and the context in which they were written in. The first part is more historical, the second more contemporary. Spatially, they relate to Poland, andin a more general senseto those regions of Europe that can be characterized as backward or peripheral. A thread that goes through all these papers is an interest in the structural specificity of economic backwardness, in its continuity and persistence, and in the challenges it poses. Economic distance from Western Europe has been a constant factor for Poland through several centuries of its history. The sense of this distance has been made more acute by cultural proximity to the West. Poland is, of course, by no means unique and in a number of respects it represents many other societies of Central and Eastern Europe. They all had to live with backwardness, and some triedfrom time to timeto escape it.

The essays in the first part also relate to debates going on in economic history, in historical sociology and in other disciplines at the times they were written. One of them, vivid in the 1960s and 1970s, was on peasantry. That debate, triggered by the processes going on in the Third World, had repercussions in several disciplinesin developmental economics, in anthropology, but also in history. Is peasant economics in some sense specific, different from other types of economic activity? Should societies dominated by peasantry be viewed as a particular social formation? Are there peculiar patterns of political activity, characteristic for peasantry? Following these arguments from the perspective of Eastern Europe, one could have had a certain feeling of dj vu, as somewhat similar debates took place in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in Eastern Europe in the inter-war period.

The first two essays in the volume are modest contributions to the peasantry debate. One shows the relations between economics and the demography of the peasant family, anotherthe mechanics of small-scale peasant resistance and the reasons why there were no large-scale peasant movements in Poland in the modern era. The first one is also a contribution to another field, quickly expanding during the sixties and onward, historical demography, and in particular to the studies of peasant households.

Another important debate was that on the rise of capitalism and the uneven spread of modernization in the modern era. Why did some areasparticularly Eastern Europelag behind the West? Were they just backward in a sense of being somewhat less advanced on a same route that the West took first? Or were they on the periphery of something called a world-system, and thus structurally placed in an inferior position? The paper on the evolution of dependency synthesizes the Polish route in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. It argues that the world-system theory is a simplification, as the lag behind the West preceded the rise of trade between the West and the East, and the way the economic system functioned could not be reduced to a simple dependency. The essay on the Polish nobles argues that, as they were culturally motivated by late feudal ethos and had no possibilities for investment other than in land and luxury, they hardly could be interpreted as representatives of peripheral capitalists, as world-system theories asserted. The next essay shifts attention to the period of industrialization. It looks at the case of the Polish Kingdom (Russian partition) in the nineteenth century, whichwhile being politically an appendix to the Russian Empire, industrially became (for a short period of time) one of its industrially most advanced regions. The essay on globalization compares how its two wavesone at the beginning, the other at the end of the twentieth centuryaffected Eastern Europe. It argues that, while the first one might have been deeper in an economic sense, the second one is deeper in a cultural sense. The last essay of this part focuses on the ambiguity of Polish social and cultural history, aswhile belonging to the West in a cultural senseit developed specific economic and social structures, related to backwardness.