New Economic History of Central and Eastern Europe?
June 05–06, 2025
The economic history of modern Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe experiences a wave of changes. Recent works questioned established narratives of interwar fragmentation and economic decline, the effects of economic nationalism on businesses, and revealed important continuities between the era of the First Globalization and the interwar. Historians started to think about Austria-Hungary as a colonial and imperial power, a turn that aligns with the growing interest of the broader historiography in the economic and informal aspects of imperialism. The combination of economic and environmental history, especially the case of wood as resource extraction provides new impetus for the debates on the nature of capitalism.
With all their methodological differences and variegated perspectives on what economic history is, these attempts make a case for the significant specificities of Central Eastern and Southeastern Europe as part of a larger continental economy, and point to the possibility of reinterpreting the region in economic terms. The ambition of this workshop is to bring together practitioners of various fields (bottom-up economic history, macroeconomic history, labor history, history of welfare, new imperial history etc.) to explore the potential and possibilities offered by the recent developments in historiography and potentially set out a new research agenda.
Convener
Participants
Martin
Bemmann
Universität Freiburg
Bianca
Centrone
Princeton University
Krisztián
Csaplár-Degovics
Research Center for the Humanities, Budapest
Antonie
Doležalová
Charles University, Prague
Adrian
Grama
Munich Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies
Zachary
Mazur
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw
Matthias
Morys
University of York, Universität Regensburg
Zora
Piskačová
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Anna
Ross
University of Sheffield
Alexia
Yates
European University Institute, Florence