This book surveys Poland’s move from being a post-feudal, backward, peripheral country to being a modern, capitalist, European state: from the partition of the commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania to the abolishment of ‘second serfdom’; late industrialization to state socialism; post-partition fragmentation to post-Second World War westward dislocation; and from the ‘Solidarność’ movement to accession into the European Union. Could Poland really be considered an ‘underdeveloped’ nation throughout the last 200 years? What factors contributed to its ‘backwardness’? Has Poland yet managed to catch up with the West? This book, the first overview of the modern economic history of Poland to be published in English, addresses these and many other questions crucial for developing our understanding of the economic history of modern Central-Eastern Europe. The economic development of Poland is analyzed through data and statistics, as well as through analysis of the ideas that paved the way for the politics of economic and social modernization.

During the 20th century, Vietnam and Poland were both victims not only of devastating wars, but also of socialist planned economies that destroyed whatever war hadn’t already. In 1990, Vietnam was still one of the poorest countries in the world, while Poland was one of the poorest in Europe. But in the three decades since then, both countries have drastically improved their citizens’ standards of living and escaped the vicious cycle of national poverty. In this book, Rainer Zitelmann identifies the reasons behind the sensational growth of both nations’ economies, drawing out the lessons that other countries can learn from these two success stories. To explain the source of their success, he returns to Adam Smith’s 1776 treatise, The Wealth of Nations: the only way to overcome poverty is through economic growth, Smith wrote, and economic freedom is the crucial prerequisite for such growth. Developments over the past 250 years have proved Smith right. The market economy has led to a global decline in poverty unparalleled in human history. Compare this to the fifty years of “development aid” in Africa that have only entrenched the status quo, and it is clear which approach yields superior results. Despite these strides, almost ten percent of the world’s population still lives in extreme poverty. So, what measures actually help to alleviate poverty today? Through a wealth of data and stories from the everyday lives of Polish and Vietnamese people who experienced reforms, Zitelmann demonstrates the persistent relevance of Smith’s ideas to economic flourishing in the 21st century.

An updated and expanded second edition covering Polish history from medieval times to the present day.

Transregional connections play a fundamental role in the history of East-Central Europe. This volume explores this connectivity by showing how people from eastern and central parts of Europe have positioned themselves within global processes while, in turn, also shaping them. The contributions examine different fields of action such as economy, arts, international regulations and law, development aid, and migration, focusing on the period between the middle of the nineteenth century and the end of the Cold War. The authors uncover spaces of interaction and emphasize that internal and external entanglements have established East-Central Europe as a distinct region. Understanding the connectedness of this subregion is stimulating for the historiography of East-Central Europe as it is for the field of global history.

This two-volume encyclopedia profiles the contemporary culture and society of every country in Europe. Each country receives a chapter encompassing such topics as religion, lifestyle and leisure, standard of living, cuisine, gender roles, relationships, dress, music, visual arts, and architecture. This authoritative and comprehensive encyclopedia provides readers with richly detailed entries on the 45 nations that comprise modern Europe. Each country profile looks at elements of contemporary life related to family and work, including popular pastimes, customs, beliefs, and attitudes. Students can make cross-cultural comparisons-for instance, a student could compare social customs in Denmark with those in Norway, compare Greece's cuisine with that of Italy, and contrast the architecture of Paris with Amsterdam and Barcelona. Culture and society are changing in each region and nation of Europe due to many political and economic forces, both inside and outside of each nation's borders. This encyclopedia considers many of the transformations connected to globalization, as well as traditions that still hold strong, to provide a complete assessment of the processes that make European societies and cultures distinctive.

This book revisits the modern history of Poland, from the perspective of its social sciences. The book makes this case study a model for the application of Bourdieu’s approach to the historical analysis of non-core Western societies. The book is, in other words, a reflexive study of the application of Bourdieu’s social theory. At the same time, it also critically studies the application of Western social theory in Poland, which is largely seen as a peripheral country. The study of Polish social sciences, with particular emphasis on linguistics and literary studies, points to the peculiar dynamics of peripheral intellectual and academic fields and their external dependencies. These insights offer a critical extension of Bourdieu’s theory of state and social elites beyond the Western core focusing on how the theories can be used in the reinterpretation and expansion of post-colonial theory, global history and comparative studies of post-communism. The book will be suitable for scholars and students of all those interested in the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, global historical sociology, societies in Central and Eastern , socio-linguistics, literary studies and political sociology.

“A compelling investigation of the pasts and possible futures of a critical ecosystem in an era of globalization and rising nationalism.” —Andrew S. Mathews, author of Instituting Nature In Europe’s last primeval forest, at Poland’s easternmost border with Belarus, the deep past of ancient oaks, woodland bison, and thousands of species of insects and fungi collides with authoritarian and communist histories. Foresters, biologists, environmentalists, and locals project the ancient Bialowieza Forest as a series of competing icons in struggles over memory, land, and economy, which are also struggles about whether to log or preserve the woodland; whether and how to celebrate the mixed ethnic Polish/Belarusian peasant past; and whether to align this eastern outpost with ultraright Polish political parties, neighboring Belarus, or the European Union. Eunice Blavascunas provides an intimate ethnographic account, gathered in more than 20 years of research, to untangle complex forest conflicts between protection and use. She looks at which pasts are celebrated, which fester, and which are altered in the tumultuous decades following the collapse of communism. Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles is a timely and fascinating work of cultural analysis and storytelling that textures its ethnographic reading of people with the agency of the forest itself and its bark beetle outbreaks, which threaten to alter the very composition of the forest in the age of the Anthropocene. “Through vivid storytelling, Eunice Blavascunas illuminates the durability of struggles around national identity and history—and the ways those struggle shape debates over ecology and nature conservation—in one of Europe’s quintessential borderlands.” —Katrina Z. S. Schwartz, author of Nature and National Identity after Communism