Category Archives: labor

by | 22 November 2024 · 3:36 pm

East Central Europe Under the Nazis

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 463-464:

By 1941, three zones of influence had emerged in Nazi-dominated East Central Europe. The first included areas where Germany destroyed states and left no native administration, itself taking rudimentary control. The second comprised areas where it destroyed states and replaced them with its own political entities, misleadingly called “independent states.” In the third zone, states remained under control of native political elites, but they came under irresistible pressure to become German allies. Only Poland belonged to the first category.

The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia fit between the first and second zones: it was occupied and destined for absorption into Germany but valued as a place that produced high-quality industrial goods. Its population was thought to be racially valuable (50 percent of the Czechs were considered assimilable; only 10 percent of the Poles) and was permitted its own heavily supervised government, with a Czech cabinet and ministries, and even a tiny armed force. Serbia was similar, a rump, embodying nothing a Serb nationalist could be proud of, with a Serb head of state who had been a Royal Yugoslav general but was under direct Nazi oversight. As we have seen, in contrast to Bohemia, a desperate underground struggle raged, extending from Serbia across Yugoslav territory, pitting German, Italian, and Croat forces against Serb nationalists and Communist internationalists.

The second zone was made up of the “independent” states of Slovakia and Croatia, called into life by Berlin with the expectation they would be loyal, co-fascist regimes; and they matched expectations, to say the least. Their ultranationalist leaders were eager to demonstrate—above all to themselves—their personal achievements for “the nation” by becoming even more racist than the state that had created them. In 1941, a Slovak newspaper boasted that the strictest racial laws in Europe were Slovak; at the same time, the brutality of the Ustasha anti-Serb actions shocked even the SS.

The final zone consisted of states that technically remained sovereign members of the international community, yet whose leaders could see from the fate of Yugoslavia and Poland the consequences of defiance. Still, unlike the puppets Croatia or Slovakia, the Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Romanian states did not owe their existence to Nazi Germany, and everything Germany wanted from them had to be negotiated. The lever for Germany in gaining compliance was territory: though less rapacious than Nazi leaders, East European elites also hungered for Lebensraum. Bulgaria hoped to recover ground lost at Neuilly-sur-Seine and wrench away disputed lands from Greece and Yugoslavia. Hungary wanted back everything it had lost at Trianon. Romania desired the return of lands it had lost in 1940, when parts of northern Transylvania went to Hungary in the second Vienna award (at the insistence of Hitler and Mussolini), and Bessarabia and Bukovina fell to the Soviet Union. These three states knew that Germany as the regional hegemon could make their aspirations become a reality.

Yet from 1941, German diplomats increasingly insisted that the governments of East Central Europe must fulfill a prime wish of their state. They should identify and segregate their Jewish populations, place them under racial laws, and deport them to German-controlled territories in Poland for a fate loosely described as “work in the east.”

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Filed under Bulgaria, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, labor, migration, military, nationalism, philosophy, Poland, religion, Romania, Slovakia, USSR, war, Yugoslavia

by | 20 November 2024 · 5:43 pm

Antifascists in 1930s Bulgaria

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 428-430:

Fascists in Bulgaria faced a distilled concentration of all the problems that handicapped counterparts in Yugoslavia or Poland: a native strongman, a native national movement that valued democracy, and an agricultural societal structure. In Bulgaria, fascism lacked the disorientated and enraged middle- and working-class constituencies that allowed it to flourish farther west. Still, like everywhere else, a native version did emerge, and it did so from the top of the political elite. After Stamboliiski’s murder in 1923, the economics professor Aleksandar Tsankov became prime minister and vigorously suppressed the Bulgarian left. He fell from power in 1926 because his rule involved brutalities that shocked European opinion, causing London bankers to threaten the withholding of loans. After that, a moderate government took office under the centrist Andrey Lyapchev (1866–1933), and the country again managed to secure international financing.

Tsankov did not fade from the scene entirely, however, and became increasingly attracted to fascist politics. In May 1934 he called for a rally ahead of Nazi leader Hermann Goering’s visit to Sofia. Some 50,000 supporters were expected. Yet three days before Goering’s visit, the Bulgarian military (“Military League”) stepped in and seized power from a weak assemblage of mainstream parties. The army officers were supported by the civilian association Zveno (“The Link”), which held that Bulgaria must be modernized from above by the enlightened few because parliaments were a thing of the past. Under Zveno’s rule, Bulgaria conformed to regional patterns: increasing dependence on the German economy, nationalist chauvinism—reflected, for example, in the changing of Turkish to Bulgarian place names—and central rule. Zveno believed the state bureaucracy had to be streamlined and rationalized, and it reduced the ranks of the civil service by one-third.

Zveno is yet another case of the terminological confusion of that period surrounding the word fascism. Although Zveno was not a paramilitary, radical nationalist, or a mass mobilization regime, the US newsweekly Time called it “fascist.” In fact Zveno was moderate in foreign policy and sought better relations with Belgrade rather than a violent seizure of disputed territory. As in Marshall Piłsudski’s Sanacja, prominent leaders were military men (Damyan Velchev, Pencho Zlatev, Kimon Georgiev), and like Sanacja, they vowed to undo the corruption of public life. Yet unlike Polish counterparts, they did not establish a government party (like BBWR) or mass movement (like OZON), although they did abolish the political parties. The National Parliament (subranie) and local governments continued, but candidates had to run as individuals. Still, most successful candidates for office had belonged to the old parties and were recognized as such. Subranie elections in early 1938 netted the opposition one-third of the votes despite the sort of harassment and manipulation seen in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.

In early 1935, King Boris III, concerned about republican sentiment in the government, disbanded the Military League and appointed a civilian prime minister loyal to himself (he maintained the ban on parties). From that moment until his death in 1943, the king controlled Bulgarian politics, appointing prime ministers as he saw fit, yet acting as a benign dictator, maintaining peace with totalitarian Germany and Russia while trying to associate Bulgaria with democratic France. As far as possible, he suppressed the terrorist IMRO. Calling himself a “democratic monarch,” Boris stayed in touch with Bulgarians by touring the country in his own locomotive, occasionally stopping to visit with villagers, to whom he dispensed trinkets and other small gifts. Several right-wing associations emerged in the late 1930s that admired Nazism, but Boris kept them in check.

Yet he also adopted certain popular fascist appearances. Given his impressive record as field commander in World War I, Boris wore a uniform with some justification, and his regime formed corporatist organizations like a state-run “patriotic” union, through which, one Communist asserted, the “fascists buried the class struggle.” Again we see the period’s flexible understanding of “fascist.” For Communists, the authoritarian antisocialist regimes were fascist by definition. In 1936 Zveno created a “Bulgarian Workers’ Union” that attempted to usurp the workers’ cause in order to strengthen the state (again very reminiscent of Italy). May Day parades continued, but red flags were replaced by Bulgarian tricolors that were blessed by priests. As we will see in Chapter 17, Boris supported the rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews when they were threatened by Germany.

Like Hungarian and Romanian authoritarians, Boris suppressed fascism yet expended much less energy for similar results. His country, even more rural and with rampant illiteracy, featured few large towns in which people might be mobilized for fascist causes. In addition, Bulgarian politics offered other options to absorb radical energies. There was Stamboliiski’s mass agrarian movement in the 1920s as well as a potent military ultra-right, and there was IMRO, the Macedonian separatist movement, which featured a strong Bulgarian irredentist faction. All of this meant that Tsankov’s followers had little chance in the urban spaces where fascism thrives. And much more successfully than Horthy or Carol, Boris III, a popular and uniformed war hero, appeared to embody the national cause. It was easy for his police to identify and arrest the relatively few fascists, especially at the universities, which served as hothouses for radical ideologies.

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by | 5 November 2024 · 5:35 am

Evolution of Polish Nationalism

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 287-289:

In much of East Central Europe, landowners or bosses were of a foreign nationality, and nationalists exploited a sense of economic oppression to spread national consciousness to the masses. For example, in the Czech lands, owners of factories or manors tended to be German, and the Czech movement accordingly defined Czech identity as anti-German. In Bosnia, the landowner was Muslim; in Slovenia, German; and in much of Croatia, Hungarian. In 1800, Prague and Brno, but also Budapest, Bratislava, Ljubljana, and Zagreb, were German-speaking cities. The German was an enemy against whom the self was clearly defined and who was then displaced from culture, business, politics, and all traces of the new standard version of the national language.

In central Poland, the landowners as well as peasants were Polish-speaking. The cities and towns, however, had mixed populations, mostly Polish, but there were also many Jews, who spoke their own language and pursued walks of life that were distinct: trade, commerce, money-lending, and small crafts. Jews often bought cattle and grain, made credit available to peasants, or ran the local inn. Nationalists thus had an opportunity: they could use anti-Semitism to convince village folk that Jews were foreign, and that as ethnic Poles, the villagers belonged to the same nation as Polish townspeople and gentry. They told poor villagers that their problem was not lack of land, education, or farming implements but the “alien” Jewish presence in nearby towns. As restrictions on Jewish ownership eased from the 1870s, Jewish families began competing with small farmers to buy up the land of impoverished gentry, and by 1912, they controlled 20 percent of the agricultural land in Galicia. Arguments that presented these inroads as unfair Jewish advantages in the economy convinced peasants that they shared a common identity with Polish landlords.

Gradually the national idea caught on among peasants, even those who had been alienated from all talk of nation and felt that the court in Vienna was their protector. Beginning in the latter decades of the century, peasants participated more actively in local self-government and took a stronger role in national life, and that also meant heightened circulation among them of nationalist arguments. Catholic priests contributed a debased and opportunistic reading of their faith to serve the cause. One wrote that a Pole who was not an anti-Semite “has no right to call himself a good Catholic or a good Pole, and cannot be a good patriot.” The Polish national movement created “Christian” institutions to strengthen “Polish” ownership in the economy (the equivalent of the Bohemian nationaler Besitzstand was polski stan posiadania), and soon there were Christian shops, Christian lending institutions, and Christian pubs, all of which had the function of linking Poles across classes in village and city and promoting upward social mobility for co-ethnics.

But even so, the inculcation of Polish nationalist narratives in the village was not easy. Before World War I, many peasants still uttered curses when the name Poland was mentioned because they associated Poland with the “lords.” And when they embraced national consciousness, peasants and their political movements claimed to do so in a way all their own, saying that national culture was unspoiled in the villages, in contrast to the towns, where the gentry had absorbed foreign ideas about states and laws. In the early twentieth century, leading Polish intellectuals bought those arguments and developed their own cult for the genuine Polishness of villagers, even seeking peasant brides.

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Filed under Bohemia, democracy, economics, Germany, labor, language, nationalism, Poland, religion, Romania, Slovakia, Yugoslavia

by | 4 November 2024 · 4:26 pm

Early Marxists vs. Nationalists

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 270-271):

For Marxists then and later, nationality was a secondary form of identity: nations rose with capitalism and would disappear when capitalism gave way to socialism. And even while they existed, nations had no value as such; nationhood was ephemeral and unsubstantial, not a lasting site of human identity.

Still, Marx and Engels were not non-national; they were culturally German and despised the small peoples who hindered the consolidation of large, “historical” nations like France, Germany, and Italy. Marx ridiculed the idea that the insignificant Czechs, living at the heart of a dynamic Germany, could have a separate state, and Engels wrote that in every corner of Europe, one encountered the “ruins” of peoples, ready to side with reaction against “historical” peoples with their missions to humankind: Scots against English, Bretons against French, Basques against Spaniards, and most recently and tragically, the “barbarian” Czechs and South Slavs against Germans and Hungarians. But Engels had not lost faith. “The next world war,” he wrote in January 1849, “will cause not only reactionary classes and dynasties, but also entire reactionary peoples, to disappear from the face of the earth. And that is also progress.”

As Engels aged, his fury tempered, but he never abandoned the notion that small peoples were “relics.” It was misguided, he wrote in 1866, to think that the “Roumans of Wallachia, who never had a history, nor the energy required to have one, are of equal importance to the Italians who have a history of 2,000 years.” The national movement continued to grow among Czechs, but he still considered them a nuisance, destined to be “absorbed as integral portions into one or the other of those more powerful nations whose greater vitality enabled them to overcome greater obstacles.” Other “remnants of bygone Slavonian peoples” that he mentioned as destined to fade into greater peoples were the Serbs, Croats, Ukrainians, and Slovaks.

The disdain for small peoples extended beyond Marx and Engels to the German socialist elite, to Ferdinand Lassalle, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, Johann Phillip Becker, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and the left liberal Leopold Sonnemann. Liebknecht, co-founder of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), considered the workers’ movement an “infallible tool to eliminate the nationalities question.” If humans saw their interests in material terms, in their ability to produce wealth and be properly rewarded, who cared what language they spoke? The imperial states were not racist and provided opportunities for Czechs or Poles who rose through education in the state bureaucracies as long as they used the imperial language. If one’s interest was universal culture, why not just use German or Russian? Socialists found no justification in history for the heart of the East European nationalist project: rescuing local vernaculars from the edge of extinction.

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by | 25 October 2024 · 5:58 am

Serbian & Bulgarian Peasant Leaders

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 261-263:

Though an underproductive agricultural regime also dominated the economies of Serbia and Bulgaria, a relation developed between elites and people in these countries that was more reminiscent of the Czech case, with national leaders drawn not from the gentry but rather from the common people; there was no native class of large landholders. Though like Romania, Serbia was a former Ottoman possession, where the overwhelming majority lived in the countryside, and socioeconomic development lagged, as in Bohemia, the medieval nobility had been destroyed. Also similar to the Czech areas of Bohemia, the emerging national elite was of peasant origin, and in the following generation, like the Czech lands, Serbia produced no significant native fascism.

In Ottoman times, spahis had held the land and produce of peasants in return for service, and then came janissaries, who later degenerated into marauding raiders. But although the right to extract dues and tributes remained in Turkish hands, unlike rural populations in Hungary or Romania, Serb peasants were not enserfed. When the Serb principality took form in the decades after 1817, the Turkish landholders gradually left, and the Serb leader Miloš Obrenović refused to permit the emergence of large landed estates, fearing they might dilute his power (he became fabulously wealthy). Thus, he left Serb society mostly of one class, a highly undifferentiated peasantry. Besides him, none of the few power holders who emerged after the 1840s had more than a few hundred hectares of land, and no one was tempted to trace a grand lineage to noble or racially superior forebears.

The Serb state at first seemed to rule by liberal principles. The constitution of 1868 provided for a legislature, and beginning in 1880, political parties developed. There were three centers of power: the bureaucracy, the politicians who had success in electoral politics, and the prince. Like Romania’s king, the prince constantly interfered, preventing the emergence of a bona fide democracy. The most important political movement was the Serb Radicals, co-founded as a peasant party in 1881 by Nikola Pašić, a peasant’s son who fell in with socialist circles during engineering studies in Zurich—a crossroads of East European Marxism—becoming Serbia’s and then Yugoslavia’s uncontested political leader until his death in 1926.

But rather than act in the peasants’ interest by promoting rural development, the Radicals evolved into an establishment political machine, advancing the state’s power and wealth by focusing public resources on the army, bureaucracy, railroads, and diplomatic service, fostering virtually every civic project short of the needs of peasants. In 1908, the Ministry of Agriculture received only 3 percent of the annual budget, while 23 percent of that budget went directly to the military and 28 percent to debt services (mostly interest on loans for railroads and the army). The justification for these expenditures was to spread the Serb state into areas considered ethnically Serb.

Yet because that agenda was broadly supported, the Serb Radical Party never sacrificed the loyalties of the peasantry, and indeed used the education system to stoke irredentist feeling. It helped that the per capita debt burden on the peasants decreased in the decades before World War I. But the Radicals also had good fortune in timing: they had claimed peasants’ loyalty from the first days of independence, through the semi-populist program of Pašić’s friend and mentor Svetozar Marković, Serbia’s first socialist, who promised to lessen state intervention into peasants’ lives. Although the Radicals were an establishment party, its intellectuals and professional politicians never lost contact with the villages, where they kept networks of supporters. When necessary, they could speak perfect peasant vernacular. Society and government thus remained cohesive, even if the competing wings of the Radical party vigorously debated politics and went in and out of government from 1892 to 1900.

Bulgaria was similar in terms of the landholding regime. When the Bulgarian national renaissance began in the mid-nineteenth century, the country was almost completely rural, run by Turkish landlords. After independence in 1878, the Turkish landowners were ejected, leaving Bulgaria a place of smallholding peasants who produced for subsistence. The most coherent institution, as in Serbia, was the state, which grew beginning in the 1870s, becoming a kind of “class” in itself and filling a social vacuum. But as we will see in Chapter 11, in contrast to Serbia, a major peasant movement emerged here—the Bulgarian Agrarian Union—with an original political philosophy that challenged the liberal state machine and irredentist nationalism as well as the monarch who pursued it.

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by | 24 October 2024 · 6:20 am

Hungarian & Romanian Gentry, 1910s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 257-259:

Rather than getting involved in risky commercial activity and taking on the role of a middle class as their liberalism demanded, for the most part Hungary’s nobles turned to Jews, many from Galicia, who within a generation formed the backbone of the entrepreneurial and professional classes. In the process, they acculturated. If in 1880, 58.5 percent of Hungary’s Jews claimed Magyar as their mother tongue, by 1910 that number had risen to 77.8 percent. Enjoying full legal equality, young Jews advanced through Hungarian educational and professional institutions and then excelled in urban pursuits in commerce, finance, and industry. They also took an important place in the agricultural economy, as landowning farmers, but also as tenants and salaried employees of large landowners, who valued Jews as efficient and rational producers.

By World War I, Hungary’s elite seemed to be opening up to Jews as well. In 1914, one-fifth of the large landholders were Jews, and over one-fifth of the deputies in parliament were of Jewish parentage. Tens of thousands of upwardly mobile Jews also excelled in patriotism, and as teachers, journalists, and professionals went into Slovak and Romanian areas spreading Magyar culture. Numerically, Magyarized Jews made the culturally Magyar population just over half of the Hungarian kingdom. At the same time, the lower class Magyar Christian population, unable to adapt as quickly to the challenges of modernization, looked on the advance of Jews with skepticism and jealousy, becoming further alienated from the gentry elite.

In contrast to the Czech national elite, Hungary’s gentry thus failed to provide perspectives for social and economic advancement for the land’s village dwellers. Instead, it endeavored to use state resources to slowly Magyarize ethnic others. Because of the property limitations on the electorate, and multiple forms of administrative chicanery, the spaces for opposition politics in Hungary, whether social or national, were severely constrained. A Hungarian Social Democratic party emerged but not a significant movement for Christian Socialism or agrarianism. The elite’s suppression and neglect of the interests and rights of the local ethnicity virtually ensured a full outburst of radical nationalism when economic circumstances reached a nadir in the early 1930s.

The relations between elite and common folk were similar in Romania, but the extremes were greater. In 1912, 82 percent of Romanians still lived in the countryside. Some 2,000 families had owned 38 percent of arable land in 1864, and that percentage worsened: in 1905, some 5,000 families controlled 50 percent of all arable land. The share of medium-sized properties was negligible (10 percent), while 40 percent of all lands consisted of tiny plots between five and ten hectares. By 1905, there was probably no country in Europe where the disparity was so great between large- and smallholdings: a few thousand families held as much land as more than a million. Like its Hungarian counterpart, the elite was quasi-aristocratic, and through control of the local administrative apparatus, they became a law unto themselves, with little concern for the welfare of peasants.

As in Hungary, professional bureaucrats of gentry (boyar) background dominated the state apparatus and acted as nationalist modernizers, focusing on development in a few large cities, but stopping short at the countryside, where grain and cereal were grown on huge estates, and asymmetrical social relations remained untouched. Also similar to Hungary was the low level of overall development, with industrial output not exceeding 15 percent of national income before World War I.

Jews likewise had particular roles in the economy and society in Romania, but as we have seen, Romania’s elite stalled on granting them citizenship rights—in defiance of the stipulations of the Congress of Berlin. Jews could not own land and therefore lived in cities, becoming artisans, traders, administrators, bankers, peddlers, tailors, and craftspeople. In 1900, less than 5 percent of Romania’s population was Jewish, but it was almost entirely urban, constituting 50 percent of the inhabitants of Iaşi and one-third those of Bucharest. Jews were employed in the advanced sectors of economy, as in Hungary, and though enjoying far less official support, they still managed to develop the economy.

The ethnic Romanian elite preferred city life and as a rule left the administration of their huge estates to middlemen, usually Greek, Armenian, Jewish, or German, who pressed as much from the peasants as possible in seasonal contracts. In Moldavia, the percentage of Jewish leaseholders approached 40 percent, and therefore in the eyes of peasants, Jews became identified as the outstretched hand of an exploitative system that extended from the remote and alien cities into their own rural homelands.

The peasants either had no land or too little to make ends meet and tended to sharecrop on the large estates. As their numbers increased, so did their misery, and many fell victim to poor diets and pellagra (a disease caused by a chronic lack of niacin, often among people heavily dependent on maize for sustenance, reported cases of which rose between 1888 and 1906 from 10,626 to more than 100,000). A particular index of peasant poverty was the high mortality rate among children. Meanwhile, the government did little to protect peasants from exploitation by landowners and their middlemen, against whom the peasants had almost no bargaining power. In tough times, desperate need for money forced peasants to sell grain to speculators at below-market value. The loans on offer were extortionate, and state taxes could amount to 80 percent of the peasants’ annual production.

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by | 23 October 2024 · 5:25 am

Protofascism in East Central Europe

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 252-254:

Bohemia’s ethnic strife did not produce protofascism in Czech politics, and indeed, fascism would remain marginal in East Central Europe as a whole, emerging in strength in only German Bohemia, Hungary, and Romania. It flourished where national leaders, usually liberals, lost touch with the common people, thereby exposing themselves to accusations of treachery and contempt by forces further to the right. Like the Linz Program authors, these forces freely mixed socialism into their nationalism.

The liberal German leadership in Vienna, who “soft-pedalled their Germanism in the interest of a multi-national state,” had alienated Bohemia’s Germans by showing little concern for the nationality struggle in Bohemia. Usually of high bourgeois background, these liberals considered lower-class supporters of Schönerer and Wolf unripe for the political process. We hear echoes of their social elitism in the words President Paul von Hindenburg later found for Adolf Hitler: he was a “Bohemian corporal.” Hitler was not from Bohemia, but in Hindenburg’s mind, he fit the stereotype of a German ethnic of poorer quality. The 1882 Linz Program spoke for marginal people like Hitler and Wolf, in whom fears of national and social decline overlapped because they felt an urgent threat to a precarious status. They were being forced back down the social ladder before they had reached the first rung of respectability.

Yet the situation differed markedly among Bohemia’s Czechs. Their national leadership included few high bourgeois or large landholders, and the movement was about national as well as social upward mobility from the start, so that Czech politicians felt personally impugned when Germans said Czechs were a people of field hands and kitchen laborers. The directors of new institutions, political parties, scholarly organizations, and newspapers were one or two generations removed from small towns or the farm. Of the Czechs serving as deputies in the Austrian Parliament in 1900, 43.1 percent came from peasant and 36.5 percent from working-class backgrounds.

This upward mobility was the consequence of institutions that Czechs themselves had built, with some help from the Austrian state, to make the world around them one that seemed their own. By 1850 Czech-language schooling was close to universal, and the Czech movement built on it with secondary and higher education. In the late nineteenth century, the wealthy architect Josef Hlávka put up hospitals as well as administrative offices for the new elites. The movement’s ability to raise money for schools, hospitals, and museums reflected the wealth of a rising ethnic middle class, often pooled in Czech savings and loans associations.

The Czech middle classes rose in an economy that was already complex and well integrated with transregional commerce. Bohemia possessed one-third of the Habsburg monarchy’s industry, with mining and textile production that went back generations; the land’s agriculture was diversified and well capitalized, and featured very old productive sectors, like fish farming. As capitalism grew and Czechs became wealthier, the abundance of social and material goods dulled the edge of class conflict, opening paths to cooperation across the political parties that had emerged by World War I, including the Marxist one. When Czechoslovakia was created in 1918, Czech parties continued to cooperate across the political spectrum.

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by | 17 September 2024 · 5:53 am

Premodern natio vs. Modern “Nation”

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 54-55:

The word “nation” (natio) existed in the premodern period but did not have the meaning it has in our day. The “nation” in the lands of Croatia, Hungary, or Poland was the hereditary elite, the gentry and nobles who enjoyed privileges that separated them from the “common” people. For example, nobles had a right to be tried by their peers and not imprisoned without charges, to raise soldiers, or to intermarry. In some cases, for example in Central Poland, the gentry were sizable, comprising up to one fourth of the population. The Hungarian gentry were about 6 percent; in France, by contrast, the nobility constituted less than 1 percent of the population. In Poland and Hungary, the rights to self-rule became substantial and made the hereditary nobility more powerful than counterparts in France, not to mention in Russia. By the sixteenth century, the Polish gentry elected its kings; during the seventeenth century, a practice emerged in which passage of legislation in the Sejm (parliament) required unanimous consent, a practice called “liberum veto.”

By the seventeenth century, the Polish nobility thus felt a strong sense of cohesion, politically and culturally, over a vast territory, and increasingly practiced Roman Catholicism, though the Protestant Reformation was at first popular and tolerated. A myth emerged according to which Poland’s nobles derived from “Sarmatians,” an ancient Iranian people who had subjugated Slavic tribes during early Christendom. This had the function of tying the group together even more tightly against all others on Polish territory, reinforcing its sense of privilege, and tending to exclude all others from the idea of nation. But the cultural identity of noble nations was premodern. Polish or Hungarian poets wrote in their own tongues from the fifteenth century (native liturgical texts are much older), producing important literatures, but they did not make a cult of language. And unlike liberal-democratic patriots of the nineteenth century, early modern nobles did not believe that all those who happened to speak Polish or Hungarian constituted a Polish or Hungarian “nation.” From the seventeenth century on, they tended to speak French or Latin among themselves and felt a cultural affinity with other European elites, with whom they shared tastes in architecture and music, and with whose sons their own mingled at universities in France and Italy.

Unlike modern nationalism, the idea of natio was therefore exclusive to a social group rather than insistently inclusive across a complex population ostensibly of one ethnicity. The early modern Polish or Croatian nobility did not think of Polish or Croatian-speaking peasants as part of their nation and often considered these peasants a lower form of humanity. The word for “peasant” was often synonymous with “slave,” evoking coarseness and absence of all taste. In decades when Western European peasants were being freed from the land and from compulsory services, a “second serfdom” was taking hold in much of Eastern Europe: those who worked the land became tied to it and could not leave without the master’s permission. They were people whom he could whip and otherwise humiliate in dozens of ways. No clear line existed dividing Eastern from Western Europe in terms of agricultural regime, but as one traveled to the east, the freedoms of the peasants tended to decrease, as did the productivity of agriculture.

When Polish or Hungarian nobles made claims to territory, it was therefore not in order to unite people of the same language or “blood.” They had no idea of including all people of their ethnicity in a particular state. But this early modern noble national identity was also not ethnically exclusive in the sense of modern nationalism. Native Ukrainian-speaking nobles living in Galicia considered themselves part of the Polish noble nation, and many of them over time became culturally Polish with no questions asked. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Vatican had supported arrangements permitting Orthodox believers in Ukraine (under Polish rule) and in Transylvania (under Habsburg rule) to be “reunited” with Rome while maintaining much of their own liturgy and practices, including married clergy. These churches of the Byzantine rite that recognize papal authority are commonly known as “Uniate.”

The importance of the older legacy of noble rights is that feelings of corporate identity and privileges survived in social groups even after political structures supporting them declined or disappeared altogether, and then were spread to other social groups, usually very slowly and unevenly. Thus the Polish, Hungarian, and Croatian gentries continued to insist on rights of self-rule and “freedom” after medieval and early modern statehood was crushed. Among the Polish gentry, even after the destruction of the Polish state in the final partition in 1795, Poland continued as a community of ideas and practices—as a common culture—and was as present among the colony of émigré Polish writers in Paris in the 1840s as it was among Polish-speakers in Polish territories then part of Austria or Russia. The ideas of this “Great Parisian emigration”—that Poland had not perished and had a mission to humanity—made their way back to the Polish lands to inspire young people from other groups, including peasants, especially as Polish education became more widespread (often through the efforts of underground nationalist activists).

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by | 9 September 2024 · 5:43 am

Caribbean Return to Indentured Labor

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 399-402:

The Caribbean of today began to form half a millennium ago, impelled by European colonial expansion harnessed to nascent capitalism and centered on resource extraction and sugar plantations producing for a global market. Within 50 years of Columbus’s landing, indigenous Caribbean populations had been dramatically reduced, largely due to disease and the harsh conditions of labor imposed by the Spanish colonizers. This diminution of indigenous peoples was accompanied by the addition of foreigners from the “Old World” of Europe, Africa, and later Asia—a socially engineered assemblage of disparate ethnolinguistic groups under conditions of coerced labor and massive wealth accumulation. The imported groups included indentured Europeans, enslaved Africans, and, later, indentured Africans and Asians.

The transformations of the plantation system had various effects on the racial and demographic composition of different colonial territories. For example, the Hispanophone Caribbean, particularly Cuba and Puerto Rico, was not significantly developed for the global sugar market until the 19th century (although by mid-century Cuba and Puerto Rico had emerged as the first and third largest producers of sugar in the hemisphere), and the proportion of European populations compared to non-European populations was far greater there than in the Francophone and Anglophone colonies.

Over the 19th century, slavery was gradually abolished in the Caribbean. Newly independent Haiti (formerly Saint-Domingue) abolished slavery in 1804, followed by the British West Indies in 1838, the French possessions in 1848, all Dutch territories by 1863, and Cuba in 1886. Emancipation presented plantation owners with a dilemma: ensuring sugar and other production at high levels without the benefit of enslaved labor, or with diminishing numbers of freed workers willing to engage in plantation labor under the conditions offered by the plantocracy. One strategy implemented by Britain and France was that of freeing Africans from the slave trade of other European colonizers (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese) and then sending them to British and French Caribbean colonies as indentured laborers. Almost 40,000 Africans were thus sent to the British West Indies and approximately 16,000 to the French West Indies (Schuler 1980).

Another form of 19th-century indenture brought immigrant laborers from Asia into the region. Organized as either state projects or private enterprises, indenture schemes evolved over eight decades and changed the demographic, cultural, and social terrain of the Caribbean as irrevocably as African slavery had done earlier. Between 1890 and 1939, for example, the Dutch recruited almost 33,000 Javanese, primarily from Central Java and Batavia, for their Caribbean colony of Suriname. The two principal source regions of indentured labor, however, were India and China. Itself a British colony, India experienced indenture as a government-regulated industry, with laborers recruited primarily from the regions of Oudh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh and shipped out from the ports of Calcutta and Madras. Between 1838 and 1917, almost 400,000 Indians arrived in the British Caribbean, the majority in Guyana and Trinidad. Although China was never colonized, its political vulnerability allowed private interests to orchestrate indenture schemes, largely from Canton. Between 1840 and 1875, approximately 142,000 indentured Chinese arrived in Cuba (Helly 1993, 20); from 1853 until 1866 and in trickles thereafter, about 18,000 Chinese were indentured in the British West Indies (Look Lai 1993, 18). Later—beginning around 1890, and concentrated between 1910 and 1940—a second wave of Chinese immigrants, this time not under indenture, arrived in the Caribbean.

The relationships of Asian indentured laborers with the local populations they encountered have influenced the values, identities, and cultural practices of their respective societies. To one extent or another, all the Asian immigrants were initially viewed by the locals as labor competition. Particularly where they constitute a large percentage of the population, Indians have been represented by local anti-indenture interests as “scab” labor, yet historically they also have been pitted against Afro-Caribbean workers. The tensions arising from perceived and actual labor conflicts have left a monumental legacy of racial politics in such contemporary societies as Guyana and Trinidad, where Indians represent more than 40% of the population. Perhaps because of their relatively smaller numbers, Chinese and Javanese laborers have had less fraught relationships with established populations, especially with those in similar occupational and class positions. In Cuba, for example, Chinese indentured laborers worked side by side with enslaved Africans. Enmity between these two groups was encouraged by colonial authorities as a divide-and-rule strategy, but tensions expressed in racial terms did not significantly persist into the present, either in Cuba or in other parts of the region. Once the Chinese found their economic niche primarily in the retail trades and shopkeeping, they no longer represented labor competition to other populations.

Migrants to the Caribbean from the Levant—known as “Syrians,” “Syrian-Lebanese,” or árabes—also began to arrive in the 1860s, increasing their numbers significantly by the 1890s. Most were Maronite Christians leaving Ottoman-occupied regions. Lebanese immigrants came first, followed by Syrians and Palestinians. Although they spread out across the Caribbean (and into Latin America, where they are also called turcos), certain communities predominated in particular countries. For example, of the three groups from the Levant, Lebanese comprise the largest population in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, and Palestinians in Haiti (Nicholls 1980). These immigrants came as individuals, or sometimes in families, rather than in an organized migration arrangement; over the years, other family members followed. Although a few went into agricultural production, others became itinerant peddlers. Within a few generations these communities branched out into import-export trading, and today they comprise a large population of affluent and politically active citizens.

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by | 21 August 2024 · 8:40 am

Indentured Servitude vs. Slavery

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 214-215:

As the 17th century drew to a close, English and French colonists were no longer able to justify investments in indentured servitude, even as temporary chattel, on economic grounds. They were, however, able to promote the institution on social and political grounds. The policy decision to pull white women from field gangs because they were better placed to serve the colonial enterprise in the field of reproduction exemplifies the significance of social forces in determining the shape of the labor system. Importantly, it shows that the planters’ efforts to reinvent servitude as slavery received some pushback for social and political purposes. In addition, there was the matter of sustaining militia regiments to assist in the suppression of enslaved Africans. To these ends colonial governments, rather than planters, sought to ramp up the demand for male servants.

Given the harshness of Caribbean work and epidemiological environments, for many servants the plantation experience amounted to lifelong enslavement. The legal requirement of fixed-time servitude and the social reality of lifelong labor were offset by mortality trends and management policy. To suggest, as one scholar does, that it “was, of course, inconceivable that any of the [white] labor pools mentioned (convicts, prisoners of war, or vagrants) could have been converted into chattel slaves” is to ignore what was taking place on the ground in the colonies (Eltis 2000, 70).

The conversion of servitude into slavery was conceived by planters of cotton, tobacco, and sugar. If these planters failed at this conversion, it was not because of weak managerial resolve, but because of the multiple internal and external forces that militated against them, including servants’ unrelenting ambition to participate in colonialism as independent wealth makers.

From the beginning, those Barbadian planters who received large grants of land calculated the benefits of importing African labor to work them. Pre-sugar Barbadian planters, such as James Drax, were directly involved in sponsoring slave voyages to the African coast; the Drax family later became sugar barons in Barbados and Jamaica. Other English merchants with investment interests in Barbados were known slave traders. The Earl of Warwick, who claimed in 1629 that Barbados was granted him by the monarch, and Maurice Thompson, a large landowner, were involved in the supply of enslaved Africans directly to Barbados before the “sugar revolution.”

The contrast with smaller landholders is sharp. Before the [Dutch] Brazilian political crisis of 1645 wrecked that country’s sugar industry, the Dutch West India Company was selling slaves on easy terms to creditable planters in Barbados and Guadeloupe. Strapped for cash and alienated from credit, the “small holders did not take to sugar,” says Blackburn, “because it was a new and unfamiliar crop, and because it could not be harvested for at least eighteen months after the first planting” (Blackburn 1997, 231). They did not attract Dutch or English credit, had no access to core funding for slave purchase, and thus remained in the servant market. In this way they drove the demand for servants despite the potential availability of slaves.

“Slavery and cotton,” then, was as established in Barbados and Guadeloupe in 1640 as would be “sugar and servitude” in 1650 and “sugar and slavery” in 1660. Between 1645 and 1650, the midpoint of the transition, the mixed-labor regime was at its peak. As big investors in cotton production, planters with financial access did two things that prepared them for sugar: they consolidated small plantations into large ones, and they made substantive purchases of enslaved Africans. Economies of scale in cotton production enabled many of these planters to access larger external credit instruments that enabled the expansion of both the servant trade and the slave trade. In addition, the planters sped up the land consolidation process that facilitated the sugar industry.

These investors became industry leaders who championed the charge into sugar production and plantation expansion after 1645. In effect, they were deepening rather than creating the reliance upon enslaved Africans. Capital was scarce and expensive; risks were high. In pursuit of profits, planters fully exploited whatever labor was within their reach. Alongside “sugar and black slavery” there was “sugar and white slavery.” Plantation agriculture before, during, and after the sugar revolution generally meant disciplined, coerced labor—and, as Williams so aptly concluded, “at times that labor has been slave, at other times nominally free; at times black, at other times white or brown or yellow” (Williams 1944, 29).

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