The Agrarian Studies Colloquium and the European Studies Council presents
Michał Pospiszyl:
“Escape Ecologies: Peasants, Nature, and Power in Eastern Europe, 1700-1850.”
This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.
It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?
Abstract: The article traces how the presence of escape ecologies (forests, swamps, wastelands) affected the relationship between subjects and centers of power (nobility and state) in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The situation in this region was unique because successive disasters, including a Little Ice Age, eighty years of continuous warfare, epidemics, and economic collapse, resulted in significant depopulation and the re-wilding of vast areas of Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine during the early eighteenth century. The dominant historical narrative portrays this period in an unequivocally negative light. This text aims to present a more nuanced perspective. Although the disasters at the turn of the eighteenth century affected all social strata, the weakening of the repression apparatus due to the crisis, as well as the growth of forests, floodplains, and wastelands, caused the eighteenth-century Commonwealth to become a place of almost mass migration, particularly from surrounding Enlightenment monarchies. For many people in Central and Eastern Europe, migrating to a country with ample hiding places, easy access to the commons, and significant privileges for folk colonizers was more appealing than living under the often- repressive systems introduced by modern states, such as compulsory conscription, high taxes, and the elimination of cultural or religious autonomy.