Rescaling, Fieldness, and Trans-Imperial Social Spaces

The concept of rescaling has been addressed by theorists in several traditions, each of which contributes to the framework developed here. The neo-Marxist approach, best represented by Brenner and Smith, treats rescaling as intrinsic to the spatial logic of capital accumulation. Brenner [Reference Brenner1999] emphasizes that scales of social organization are produced by specific social property relations and class struggles rather than by the mere extension of markets: the shift from local/feudal scales to national/capitalist scales was driven by transformations in class power that preceded and shaped the scale of the market. Smith [Reference Smith1984] provides the most systematic theory of rescaling through his concept of the spatial “seesaw” of capital: capital must fix itself in place to produce value but must remain mobile to maximize returns, and this tension generates historically specific scales—urban, regional, national, global—as successive containers of capital accumulation. From this perspective, the emergence of Central European nation-states around 1918 can be interpreted as the rise of a new scale of capital organization in the region. This new scale was becoming dominant precisely as the imperial scale of accumulation was exhausted on the eastern periphery of Europe. The succeeding network of nation-states, heavily dependent on capital from the Western core, proved functional for global capital at this historical conjuncture—an arrangement that was dissolved in 1939 and reconstituted with greater intensity after 1989 [Berend Reference Berend Iván1996].

Mann’s IEMP model [Mann Reference Mann1986]—which organizes power through four overlapping networks of ideological, economic, military, and political power—offers a complementary, multidimensional account in which rescaling is a non-linear process of “interstitial emergence,” whereby new organizations form in the gaps of existing power structures and eventually force a reorganization of the entire system. Unlike the Marxist view of the state as primarily a tool of capital, Mann’s framework treats the state as an actor capable of rescaling social life through its own institutional logic, including the production of national identities through military mobilization. The declining empires of the late 19th century can be understood, on this account, as attempting to manage centrifugal pressures—economic, national, ideological—through the establishment of autonomous regions and institutions, thereby generating the very institutional niches in which peripheral nationalisms flourished. Mann’s example of the Catholic Church as a transnational ideological scale that bypassed the fragmented political scales of feudalism is directly relevant to the present analysis: in the 19th century, the Church served as an important ally of several peripheral nationalisms, most notably Polish and Irish, enabling the construction of trans-imperial national platforms that could integrate into the wider European system on new terms [Rokkan and Urwin Reference Rokkan and Urwin1983]. Peripheral areas are not analyzable without accounting for the global scale; the often dynamic transformations on the peripheries can be seen as particularly acute concentrations of global transformation processes, where weaker state and imperial structures allow more dynamic shifts in scale [Rokkan Reference Rokkan and Gottmann1980].

Bourdieu’s field theory provides the central analytical vocabulary for our analysis. A field of power is not simply a political arena but the site of struggles over the legitimate principles of domination across all social fields: it is the space within which elites from different fields negotiate the hierarchies of capital types within a given society and the conditions of mutual convertibility between them. The criteria by which an imperial social space may be said to constitute a proto-field of power require careful specification. Bourdieu’s principal criterion is the degree of a field’s autonomy—both relative to the field of power (in our case this would be imperial fields of powers) and relative to other fields—which must attain a visible threshold for independent operation, alongside the clarity of the field’s boundaries and the existence of a specific subtype of capital as the central stake of the game. Steinmetz [Reference Steinmetz2016] proposes varying degrees of settledness as an additional dimension of fieldness: in a settled field, agents agree on how the central form of capital is measured and distributed. Buchholz and Schmitz [Reference Buchholz, Schmitz, Vandenberghe and Papilloud2025] add a third analytically distinct criterion: the degree of relationality, referring to the density and strength of relations connecting the field’s entities. These three dimensions—autonomy, settledness, and relationality—provide a more discriminating framework for assessing “fieldness” in contexts of incipient or contested field formation. The relationship between field analysis and network analysis, often treated as alternatives [De Nooy Reference De Nooy2003], is productively complicated by the present case: the Polish elite network can be analyzed in both frameworks, and both may be seen in fact as ideologies employed by the actors themselves. Of course, the social actors of the period we are analyzing did not use the terms “field” or “social space,” but they did employ concepts that implied openness, diversity, or the political, that is not purely personal, logic of the elite they were trying to redefine. On the other hand, they used the concept of a network, which implies the centrality of direct relationships among members of the elite, often of a familial or close social nature. In any case, the global-historical kinship network perspective [O’Brien Reference O’Brien2026], which identifies durable densities of relations and resources as constitutive of upper-class persistence, complements this framework. This is because kinship ties among elites serve as conduits for the bulk of their resources across space and time, and such an elite network can be observed in the Polish case [Wroński and Minakowska Reference Wroński and Minakowska2026], though to legitimize itself it requires universalization in the form of national culture and political ideals.

The trans-imperial spaces of national elite integration analyzed here constitute a specific subtype of transnational weak fields, a category developed by Vauchez [Reference Vauchez2011] and Mudge and Vauchez [Reference Mudge and Vauchez2012] in terms of limited field autonomy: exhibiting low separateness and indistinct boundaries, highly interdependent with adjacent fields, and occupying an “interstitial” space [see also Medvetz Reference Medvetz2012]. This locates them within the growing literature on transnational social fields [Go and Krause Reference Go and Krause2016; Kauppi Reference Kauppi2018; Schmidt-Wellenburg and Bernhard Reference Schmidt-wellenburg and Bernhard2020], which typically analyzes specialized fields organized around international organizations or professional domains—international law [Dezalay and Garth Reference Dezalay and Garth2011], art [Buchholz Reference Buchholz2022], central banking [Lebaron Reference Lebaron2010], NGOs [Krause Reference Krause2014]—as well as diasporic fields [Faist Reference Faist1998; Tabar Reference Tabar2020]. The category introduced here differs from these contemporary formations in several crucial respects. Contemporary transnational fields are typically anchored in specific institutional cores (EU agencies, UN bodies, the IMF, etc.); pre-1918 national proto-fields lacked any single such institution, instead making strategic and often informal parallel use of institutions at multiple levels, including imperial ones. Contemporary transnational fields are specialized and post-national in orientation; the trans-imperial national fields discussed here were general fields of elite integration spanning the full range of social positions and were proto-national rather than post-national. These contrasts are themselves theoretically informative: they indicate that the general trend toward transnational field formation observed in contemporary sociology runs on a different historical logic than the trans-imperial integration of 19th century national elites.

When “history accelerates”—as in the conjuncture of World War I and the Russian Revolution—mechanisms of rescaling are triggered: the shared economic, political, and symbolic space of empire collapses, resources undergo rapid devaluation, and they are reconstituted in emerging national fields that assign them different values and exchange rates. A new social order emerges, organized on a new scale, in which the central point of reference is a new field of power. As a result of the field’s transformation, old alliances break down, all types of resources are reclassified, many of them lose their value almost entirely, and the conditions for mutual exchange of resources also change. This is what Korhonen [Reference Korhonen2018] identifies as the transition from imperial symbolic capital—which mediated and connected other forms of capital under empire, interconnecting but not fully structuring the political field—to national metacapital, which in Bourdieu’s ideal-type nation-state regulates other forms of capital and their exchange. The disappearance of imperial symbolic capital and its replacement by national metacapital organized on a radically smaller scale is the core process that the concept of field rescaling makes analytically tractable, and it is precisely in contrast with Bourdieu’s model that its theoretical specificity becomes visible: whereas his model describes a strongly centralized consolidating state operating on a single dominant scale, imperial frontiers such as Central Europe present competing scales constantly generating at least two simultaneous dimensions of elite integration—the imperial and the national, the latter, often further subdivided into lower-level dimensions encompassing regional and other unsuccessful political projects.

Rescaling, however, is not a uniform process with a single outcome. Its trajectories vary along at least three dimensions, each developed comparatively in the penultimate section of this paper. The first concerns the institutional anchor of the emerging national field: a proto-field could attach itself to a pre-existing sovereign core, as Romanian elites from the Habsburg territories did after 1918; it could construct a national field without such an anchor, as in Poland; or it could be prevented from institutionalizing altogether, as in the Armenian case, where physical annihilation and geopolitical foreclosure left the proto-field in a permanently diasporic condition [Tabar Reference Tabar2020]. The second dimension concerns the position of the elite within the collapsing empire: elites that had been dominated within imperial fields faced a different rescaling problem than formerly co-dominant elites such as the Hungarian one, whose field of power was truncated rather than newly bounded. The third dimension distinguishes contractive from expansive rescaling. The former compresses a trans-imperial space into a bounded national field; the latter describes trajectories in which actors unable or unwilling to operate within the new national fields built transnational platforms exceeding the imperial scale, from the Comintern to the agrarian internationals and the Promethean networks sponsored by the Polish state itself. This third dimension makes explicit that rescaling is not synonymous with nationalization: the same conjuncture that produced nationalizing states in Brubaker’s [Reference Brubaker1996] sense also produced successor polities acting, in Kumar’s [Reference Kumar2010] formulation, as nation-states behaving like empires. The typology generated by these dimensions allows the framework to yield differentiated comparative expectations rather than a redescription of a single case.

Methodological Nationalism, Critical Historiography, and the Positioning of the Argument

The preceding framework stands in explicit critical dialogue with what Chernilo [Reference Chernilo2011] identifies as methodological nationalism—the assumption that the nation-state is the natural unit of social organization and analysis—as this assumption persists in both Central European historiographies and in mainstream Bourdieusian sociology. The critique is directed not at the historiographical field as a whole but at a specific teleological paradigm—most influential in textbook-level syntheses and politically charged public scholarship—that reads the 19th century as dominated by a logic of anti-imperial resistance inevitably culminating in national independence. The primordialist approach that treats the nation as a transcendent essence has deeply shaped academic knowledge about Central and Eastern European societies across disciplines. At the level of research-oriented historiography, however, substantial progress has already been made in the directions this paper advocates, and any strong version of the methodological-nationalist critique must be qualified accordingly.

Within Polish historiography itself, the imperial entanglement of Polish elites has been extensively documented, if not always theorized in the terms proposed here. Chwalba’s study of Poles in Russian imperial service demonstrates that collaboration with Tsarist structures was far more widespread than nationalist narratives typically acknowledge [Chwalba Reference Chwalba1999]. Łazuga’s research on Polish politicians at the apex of the Habsburg monarchy—cataloguing sixteen Poles who served in Austrian cabinets, including three prime ministers—provides an empirical foundation for the concept of a trans-imperial proto-field theorized in this paper [Łazuga Reference Łazuga2013]. German historiography has contributed analogously: Ganzenmüller’s study reconstructs the contradictions of elite co-optation and state-building in the western provinces of the Tsarist Empire from a deliberately bilateral perspective, explicitly breaking with the nationally separated traditions of both Polish and Russian scholarship [Ganzenmüller Reference Ganzenmüller2013]. Schulze Wessel’s comparative work situates both Polish and Ukrainian national movements firmly within the logic of competing imperial fields rather than treating them as autonomous expressions of national will [Schulze Wessel Reference Schulze wessel2025]. Stempin’s contributions to the historiography of the German occupation of the Kingdom of Poland similarly problematize the boundaries between national and imperial frames [Stempin Reference Stempin2016].

Anglophone new imperial history has produced an analogous body of scholarship. Vushko’s work on the Habsburg administration in Galicia illuminates the specific imperial institutional fabric within which the Polish proto-field operated in the Austrian sector [Vushko Reference Vushko2015]. Studies of minorities across the imperial divide—on Jewish integration and politics [Weeks Reference Weeks1996; Blobaum Reference Blobaum2005], the German minority in Polish lands [Blanke Reference Blanke1981; Chu Reference Chu2012], and the eastern borderlands [Brown Reference Brown2004; Ciancia Reference Ciancia2020; Lewis Reference Lewis2019]—collectively demonstrate that the imperial social field was multiply cross-cut by ethnic, religious, and professional identities irreducible to a binary of national and foreign. These works are directly relevant to the argument advanced here: the Polish trans-imperial space was not a homogeneous national entity but a competitive arena whose boundaries were precisely what was at stake in the struggles analyzed in this paper. The trans-imperial dimensions of Ukrainian state formation have been analyzed by Fowler [Reference Fowler2015], Ther [Reference Ther, Kasianov and Ther2009], Kasianov and Ther [Reference Kasianov and Ther2009], while the new imperial history of Ukraine includes Baumann [Reference Baumann2023], Kotenko [Reference Kotenko, Staliūnas and Aoshima2021], and Bilenky [Reference Bilenky2012]. Non-Polish analyses of the Polish trans-imperial trajectory have been offered, among others, by Waldstein [Reference Waldstein2010].

Within Bourdieusian Polish sociology, the long-run dynamics of capital conversion between the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and intelligentsia have been analyzed by Zarycki [Reference Zarycki2022], and the political value of cultural capital for elite nationalist mobilization has been examined by Kurjanska [Reference Kurjanska2019]. The present paper’s contribution lies not in identifying these processes for the first time but in providing a field-theoretical framework—centered on the mechanism of rescaling—that can integrate and generalize across them, connecting the Polish empirical literature with the broader comparative and theoretical debates in historical sociology on transnational fields, post-imperial transitions, and the sociology of elites.

The Polish Trans-Imperial Proto-Field: Structure, Capital, and Paradoxes

Of the three empires that held Polish lands in the 19th century, the Russian Empire contained by far the largest portion of former Polish territory and the most substantial concentration of Polish industrial and financial capital; this paper therefore focuses primarily on the transformation of the Polish political and economic field in the Russian sector. This choice requires justification, since the Austrian sector presented a markedly different configuration. Galicia’s economic weight was considerably more modest than that of Russian Poland—it remained largely agrarian and underdeveloped relative to the industrializing Congress Kingdom, whose Warsaw and Łódź-centered economy represented the dominant pole of Polish capital accumulation [Kochanowicz Reference Kochanowicz2006]—but its political significance within the trans-imperial proto-field was disproportionate to its economic scale. After 1867, Polish parties in Galicia operated openly within a fully developed estate-based party system and exercised influence at the imperial level well beyond what their provincial weight would suggest, including the sixteen ministerial appointments and three prime ministerial roles documented by Łazuga [Reference Łazuga2013]. The integration of economic and political capital in Galicia—where large landed estates provided the material base for parliamentary careers and Vienna connections—was in some respects less disjunctive than in the Russian sector. The focus on Russian Poland reflects not the marginality of Galicia but the analytical priority of the sector where the rescaling of 1917–1918 was most abrupt, and where the gap between the imperial scale of capital accumulation and the contracted national field was therefore widest.

The Polish state had formally ceased to exist with the final partition in 1795, though small semi-autonomous Polish entities persisted briefly: the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw (1807–1815) and the Congress Kingdom of Poland within Russia (1815–1832), established at the Vienna Congress. After 1832, the Kingdom of Poland continued as a province of the Russian Empire with no political rights, though retaining some cultural, economic, and legal autonomy. The anti-Russian uprisings of 1830–1831 and 1863–1864 further restricted Polish autonomy in Russia, while the revolution of 1905 opened a new, more complex phase [Blobaum Reference Blobaum1995; Marzec Reference Marzec2020].

In the terms of the theoretical framework developed above, the Polish trans-imperial space can be analyzed as a proto-field of power organized around a specific form of national metacapital: Polishness as both cultural and political capital, referencing a long history of statehood formally existing from the late 10th century to 1795 and constituting one of the “historical European nationalities” with a well-developed national culture and a strong component of high culture. The central capital of this field had both a cultural and a social-political aspect, and it was not defined ethnically but rather politically—making it a relatively inclusive field under construction. Moreover, it was actively supported also by actors who were previously further removed from Polishness as defined at any given moment, since it served as a tool for the legitimization of elites, including their new factions. The field had the structure characteristic of mature fields of power, including the classic opposition between a pole of economic capital (landowners and emerging bourgeoisie) and a pole of cultural capital (the intelligentsia), as well as a dimension of opposition between a heteronomous pole (advocating cooperation with the empires) and an autonomous pole (oriented toward confrontation and independence). Because of its close ties with the Russian Empire’s economic system and administrative structures, the economic pole was markedly more pro-imperial than the cultural-intelligentsia pole.

The field, or social space if we do not recognize its full fieldness, also exhibited the limitations characteristic of a proto-field: its boundaries were unclear and highly permeable; its “settledness” [Steinmetz Reference Steinmetz2016] was weak, with no consensus on how to measure Polishness; its institutionalization was incomplete or almost absent in some parts of the Polish lands; and its autonomy was conditional and contested—as evidenced by the fact that some empires, at different moments, denied that an independent Polish elite existed, only to recognize it when it served their political interests. The degree of relationality [Buchholz and Schmitz Reference Buchholz, Schmitz, Vandenberghe and Papilloud2025] was nonetheless higher: we are dealing with a fairly well-integrated elite group sharing direct ties, common cultural capital, and significant economic resources, structured by the durable density of familial and kinship networks that, in O’Brien’s [Reference O’Brien2026] framework, serve as conduits for the bulk of elite resources across space and time. It must be admitted that the ultimate criterion for retroactively confirming that a social space constituted a proto-field of power is the subsequent political success of the national project—the transformation of the national movement into the elite of a nation-state. It is important to be aware of the teleological dimension of this confirmation: the subsequent success of Polish statehood makes the pre-1918 space appear as its natural precursor. A counterexample is the Belarusian network, which never achieved comparable success; had it established a nation-state around 1918, the historiography of its proto-field would be considerably richer. This observation acknowledges the inevitable subjective nature of our analysis as well, which, whether we like it or not, is based in part on a national framework from which it simultaneously attempts to distance itself.

The trans-imperial Polish space of elite integration contained both formal and informal dimensions, and made strategic use of imperial institutions while at the same time developing its own. Formal trans-imperial structures included Polish parliamentary circles in the Prussian Landtag (1848–1918), the Reichstag (1871–1918), the Austrian Reichsrat (1867–1918), and the Russian State Duma (1906–1917). While the Polish circles in Prussia and Russia confined their activities primarily to lobbying for partial autonomy and linguistic rights, the Austrian Polish circles had a much wider scope of activity in light of Galicia’s substantial autonomy. The most significant independent trans-imperial coordinating institution was the Provisional Commission of the Confederated Independence Parties (Komisja Tymczasowa Skonfederowanych Stronnictw Niepodległościowych, or KSSN), established in Vienna in 1912 [Garlicki Reference Garlicki1964]. Polish political parties became increasingly integrated at the national level as World War I approached [Cybulski Reference Cybulski, Koredczuk and Wiązek2020], while the more conservative parties had long maintained the closest trans-imperial cooperation [Molenda Reference Molenda and Zieliński1976]. Academic and cultural institutions provided a much longer tradition of trans-imperial integration, centered notably on the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (Akademia Umiejętności) in Kraków [Galos Reference Galos and Zieliński1976] and a range of private scientific and cultural bodies with trans-imperial reach [Cabaj Reference Cabaj2005; Hinc Reference Hinc2013]. Economic elites maintained significant trans-imperial platforms [Caban and Wiech Reference Caban and Wiech2010], and the construction of monuments to Polish historical and cultural figures served as a highly visible form of integration linking economic and cultural elites, with the former financing and the latter providing the material and ideological forms [Dabrowski Reference Dabrowski2004].

The informal dimension was equally important. Key nodes of the trans-imperial space were located outside Polish territory, above all Paris, where successive waves of émigré elites congregated after the uprisings of 1831 and 1863 [Molenda Reference Molenda and Zieliński1976]. The capitals of the partitioning powers—St. Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin—served as other important centers of coordination, hosting Polish elite salons and informal circles where national and imperial elites interacted directly, often in settings organized by wealthy and influential personalities who owned palaces or large houses in the imperial capitals. Political activity could be considerably freer in imperial capitals than on Polish soil; the influential Polish weekly Kraj was published in St. Petersburg under markedly less censorship than the press in Russian Poland. Ther [Reference Ther, Miller and Rieber2004: 55] noted that the transnational scope of the Polish elite network made it comparatively modern: its intensive connections with France, the United States, and other Western countries where the Polish diaspora, particularly its elites, were concentrated, gave it a level of internal and external communication that enabled it to challenge German-speaking populations who may have been more developed economically but lacked comparable communicative integration.

The identities of members of the Polish elite within the three empires were complex, multidimensional, and variable over time and context. Polishness had confessional, familial, linguistic, and social-class aspects, all subject to constant renegotiation. Transitions from Polishness to Russianness and vice versa intensified in the late 19th century, Jewish assimilation into various national cultures continued apace [Eisenbach Reference Eisenbach1991], and national movements consolidated among Belarusians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians, drawing parts of the intelligentsia into their spheres [Snyder Reference Snyder2003]. After the 1905 Revolution, mass political mobilization included the lower classes in the trans-imperial Polish political nation [Marzec Reference Marzec2013]. Contemporary national historiographies naturalize identities that were historically contested, and the post-1918 dominance of national categories can itself be linked to what Korhonen [Reference Korhonen2018] identifies as the disappearance of imperial symbolic capital: culture, science, history, and politics that had previously been produced within trans-imperial exchanges were nationalized, reconfiguring the empire-nationalism relationship from an interactive dynamic to a dichotomous framework.

One of the key functions of the Polish trans-imperial space was the strategic exploitation of inter-imperial tensions and institutional discontinuities. The three empires did not fully synchronize their Polish policies, which allowed the trans-imperial elite to relocate resources and activities between empires, to play off inter-imperial competitions, and to maintain popular integration through religious institutions—above all the Catholic Church—that the empires could not fully counter [Rokkan and Urwin Reference Rokkan and Urwin1983]. After the Austrian Empire was weakened by its wars with Prussia (especially 1866), it granted considerable cultural autonomy to Galicia and tolerated national minority movements opposed to Russia, a configuration interpretable in terms of the interface periphery status of the region [Rokkan Reference Rokkan and Gottmann1980]. What Mann [Reference Mann1986] calls “interstitial emergence” is directly applicable here: the Polish trans-imperial space grew in the gaps between weakly coordinated imperial policies and institutional infrastructures, turning their lack of synchronization into a structural resource.

Elites, Capital, and Cleavages in Russian Poland

Russian Poland underwent a major economic transformation in the late 19th century. The unprecedented accumulation of economic capital in Warsaw and Łódź produced a powerful bourgeoisie of bankers and industrialists [Kołodziejczyk Reference Kołodziejczyk1979], whose financial institutions—notably Bank Handlowy, Warsaw’s largest bank—financed substantial production and infrastructure projects with networks extending into the Russian Empire and Germany. Poland’s position between two great economies generated a dynamic of dependent but real economic development [Kochanowicz Reference Kochanowicz2006]. Landowners attempted to become financiers and industrialists, while the rich bourgeoisie attempted to become landowners through matrimonial alliances and the purchase of prestigious estates. Sources of capital were diverse; some of it came from Germany or France, but the bulk of its stock was accumulated and managed locally. Equally diverse was the ethnic origin of the local owners: they included, first of all, German- and Jewish-origin families, as well as a number of Polish aristocratic families and nouveau-rich Poles. German-origin owners and richer Jews gradually Polonized, especially as they accumulated wealth [Eisenbach Reference Eisenbach1991].

The emergence of the intelligentsia as a distinct cultural elite was, in important respects, an unintended byproduct of imperial modernization: the networks of primary and secondary schools established by the partitioning empires educated successive generations of the intelligentsia, whose core was composed of the sons and daughters of petty and impoverished nobility, supplemented by Jewish and peasant offspring [Eyal et al. Reference Eyal, Szelényi and Townsley1998]. This new cultural elite was produced both by imperial modernization efforts and by the Polish bourgeoisie, which financed its infrastructure through private institutions—including the Wawelberg Technical School in Warsaw and the Mianowski Fund—that compensated for the lack of state-funded Polish higher education. It can thus be argued that before World War I, the Polish bourgeoisie invested simultaneously in the Polish space of national elite integration—through support for Polish culture and science as a form of national legitimacy—and in the imperial fields, through maintaining political relations in imperial capitals. This observation can be related to Steinmetz’s [Reference Steinmetz2008: 601] argument regarding the German Empire: Bildungsbürgertum was the dominated class in the metropolis but was dominant in certain colonial contexts; an analogous logic structured the status of the intelligentsia in the peripherally administered Polish lands, where it combined relative dependence on economic and imperial capital with genuine autonomy in the cultural sphere.

This dual dependence on imperial modernization and bourgeois patronage shaped not only the intelligentsia’s rise but also the structural conditions of its eventual dominance. When the imperial order and much of the bourgeoisie collapsed in 1917–1918, the intelligentsia was positioned to assume the dominant role in the newly institutionalized Polish field of power precisely because its cultural capital was the least dependent on the institutions that had just been destroyed. More broadly, the bourgeois-landowner alliance in Russian Poland mirrors the pattern Hart [Reference Hart2022] identifies in the great political revolutions of the 1860s and 1870s, in which capitalists and military-landlord classes allied explicitly to build states capable of managing industrial workforces. In Central and Eastern European stateless nations, an analogous dynamic saw economic elites fund cultural institutions and negotiate autonomy with imperial authorities as a vehicle for national legitimation—a role systematically overlooked by historiographies that privilege the intelligentsia as the primary agent of nationalism [Brubaker Reference Brubaker1996].

The political field in Russian Poland was organized around the cleavages these processes produced. The powerful National Democratic Party (Endecja), led by Roman Dmowski, dominated the right, attracting broad popular support [Porter Reference Porter2000] and exploiting the rise of antisemitism in the late 19th century. The left was divided between the internationalist Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) and the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), which combined socialist and independence programs under leaders including Józef Piłsudski. The relationship between these parties and their Russian counterparts was structured but not uniform: the SDKPiL maintained an uneasy and contested association with the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP), resisting subordination to a centralized pan-imperial party, while the PPS-Left cultivated closer ties with the Mensheviks than with the Bolsheviks. Attitudes toward Duma participation were no less varied: while Endecja and the liberals engaged with imperial representative institutions from the outset, initially SDKPiL and the PPS boycotted the Duma elections, though this position was not consistently maintained—socialist candidates did eventually participate, including in the Fourth Duma [Samuś Reference Samuś2013]. The liberal camp, smaller but influential before 1905, was divided between the loyalist Party of Real Politics (SPR) and a wing supporting federalist ideas aligned with Russian liberals, represented primarily by the Progressive Democratic Party (PPD) under Aleksander Świętochowski. The internal dynamics of the Russian Empire political field—pitting the conservative Octobrist Party, the liberal Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), and various socialist formations against each other—were homologously mirrored in the structure of Polish political cleavages. Before 1914, Polish liberals cooperated extensively with the Russian Cadets and, to a lesser degree, with the Socialist-Revolutionaries [Marzec Reference Marzec2020]. A key moment of mass political incorporation occurred with the 1905 Revolution, which extended the trans-imperial Polish political nation beyond the elite to include the lower classes [Marzec Reference Marzec2013].

The intelligentsia’s position within this field was distinctive. As the bourgeoisie-funded institutions became relatively autonomous tools of the intelligentsia elite, cultural capital acquired dual autonomy: one dimension was built against economic capital and its elite; a second was built against the state elites of the three empires, though particularly in the Russian Empire, institutions controlled by the intelligentsia also drew on imperial state financing and legitimation. This ambiguity—simultaneously dependent on and autonomous from both imperial and economic capital—is what structurally positioned the intelligentsia to take over the national field of power once the imperial and economic bases of the other elite factions collapsed. In the Polish context, the key ideological marker of this structural opposition was the legacy of the January Uprising of 1863: liberal nationalists proposed the ideology of positivism (organic labor) as an alternative to insurrectionary politics [Surman Reference Surman, Feichtinger, Fillafer and Surman2018], but by the early 1880s, the intelligentsia had departed from positivism in two opposite directions—toward the nationalist right (National Democracy) and toward socialist or communist internationalism—with both factions, despite their ideological divergence, sharing an anti-imperial orientation that was missing from the bourgeois liberals.

The Effects of Rescaling: The Second Polish Republic and Elite Displacement

The Polish-Soviet Treaty of Riga (1921) recognized not only the new eastern borders of Poland but also the expropriation of Polish landowners in the Soviet sphere—an outcome that proved deeply costly to the landed interest despite National Democratic lobbying for Russian restitution of state property within the pre-partition frontiers. The settlement reflected the primacy of Endecja’s commitment to an ethnically bounded state: the imperative of incorporating only territories where ethnic Poles formed a clear majority outweighed the material interests of landowners in the eastern borderlands, even though, once its incorporatist and anti-federalist goals were secured, National Democracy proved willing to defend Polish land ownership in the eastern lands vigorously during the subsequent land reform debates. The relationship between the landed elite and National Democracy was thus one of constrained alignment rather than organic affinity: as Mich [Reference Mich2000] demonstrates, landowners supported Endecja in the interwar period less out of ideological conviction than because it represented the least damaging of the options available in a political field reorganized on terms structurally unfavorable to them. Landowners suffered further from agrarian reforms and the mounting crisis of the manor economy within Poland itself. The Great Depression of the 1930s hit Poland especially hard, further weakening the already diminished bourgeoisie and landed class.

Not all segments of the economic elite experienced this collapse through the immediate mechanism of Bolshevik expropriation. A distinct trajectory is visible among industrialists, bankers, and estate-purchasing families—including those of Jewish origin who had invested in landownership as a vehicle for social and political legitimation, a pattern well established in both the Russian and Austrian sectors [Eisenbach Reference Eisenbach1991]—whose assets initially remained intact within the borders of the new state. Crucially, exposure to imperial-scale losses was proportional to the scale of the enterprise: the largest fortunes, most deeply integrated into the Russian market and most reliant on cross-imperial networks, suffered the most immediate and total destruction, while mid-sized firms and estates confined largely to Polish territory retained some economic standing, albeit a declining one. For both groups, however, the effects of rescaling ultimately proved decisive. The loss of access to the Russian market, combined with the tariff conflict with Germany, structurally compressed the scale on which imperially accumulated capital could function [Koryś Reference Koryś2018]; what had been viable as an imperial-scale enterprise was frequently unviable within the bounded national economy of the Second Republic. Direct expropriation and structural market contraction were thus distinct mechanisms, operating at different speeds and on different fractions of the elite, but producing convergent outcomes: the devaluation of capital forms built at an imperial scale and the progressive displacement of their owners from the field of power of the new national state.

The loss of material resources was compounded by the severing of the Polish elite from the political resources of the imperial field. By 1915, Polish territory was under German and Austrian occupation, cutting off access to Russia—though this was not yet a complete rupture, as a large part of the Polish elite and population remained in Russia and the war’s outcome was undecided. Parts of the Polish trans-imperial space continued to function in St. Petersburg and elsewhere. The formal institution exercising power in the German-controlled Kingdom of Poland—the Regency Council—gave representatives of the conservative faction of the Polish elite key roles, while elections to newly established municipal self-government gave the economic elite privileged positions [Kauffman Reference Kauffman2015]. The decisive break came with the revolutionary events of late 1917 and 1918: as the Russian Empire ceased to exist, its liberal and bourgeois elites—the main political partners of the Polish progressive liberals—were annihilated, often literally, along with the foundations of their status. Some were killed by the Bolsheviks in the first years of Soviet rule, many left the country, and all were stripped of their property. This configuration ended when Poland regained independence and the Regency Council handed power to Józef Piłsudski—a socialist and representative of the Polish intelligentsia—marking the decisive institutionalization of a new national field of power. Its new configuration marginalized the previously influential liberal circles in particular, consigning to rapid oblivion the tradition of liberal nationalism they had developed.

The three main mechanisms of rescaling can be clearly identified in this transition. First, the devaluation of capital forms underwritten by imperial frameworks: the economic capital of landowners and industrialists lost much of its value as imperial markets collapsed and eastern properties were expropriated. Second, the disruption of elite coalitions: the liberal bourgeois camp lost its main political partners in the Russian liberal field to revolutionary annihilation, while Dmowski’s ability to gain Western recognition of Polish interests gave National Democracy an advantage that the liberals—more closely tied to republican Russia—could not match [Wolff Reference Wolff2020]. Third, the emergence of new legitimation principles: the new Polish field of power was organized around different social and political cleavages than the imperial one; the institutional structures of modern national culture—largely financed by the pre-war bourgeoisie—survived the fall of the old economic and imperial order and became the foundations of the new Polish state, but they were now controlled by the intelligentsia, whose cultural capital was least dependent on imperial institutional structures and most capable of reorienting to the national field.

The fate of the Polish communists after 1918 illustrates a further dimension of rescaling. Many emigrated and became Soviet citizens; the Communist Party of Poland (KPP) was formally outlawed in 1919 and remained permanently on the margins of the Second Republic’s political field. The Soviet Union’s initially internationalist ideology institutionalized Polish minority representation through the Commissariat for Polish Affairs, but these policies were progressively dismantled under Stalin, who pushed toward a Russian-dominated unitary model and murdered much of the Polish communist elite, as well as approximately 100,000 Poles during the Great Purge of 1937–1938. This trajectory illustrates that the collapse of the Russian imperial field and its transformation into the Soviet field generated its own rescaling logic, with analogous displacement of factions unable to convert their capital in the reconstituted field. A comparable analysis could be extended to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, examining the changing scale of Russia’s field of power alongside those of the successor states it previously controlled.

The Limits of a Field-Rescaling Explanation: Competing Accounts

The argument that the marginalization of Poland’s liberal bourgeoisie and landed elite after 1918 can be interpreted as a field effect––that is, that it resulted primarily from the loss of imperial conversion mechanisms––requires direct engagement with competing theoretical interpretations. Without such a direct engagement, the field-rescaling account risks overstating the specificity of the Polish trajectory—treating as an imperial-structural outcome what was in significant measure a broader European-level transformation.

The most powerful challenge is posed by comparative work on cases where liberal elites declined without anything resembling sharp post-imperial rescaling. Schorske’s [Reference Schorske1979] foundational study of Vienna demonstrates that the crisis of liberal hegemony in Austria was structurally complete well before 1918. The characteristic liberal bourgeoisie of the Habsburg capitals—educated, cosmopolitan, economically powerful—lost its political grip not because empires collapsed but because the mass politics of the 1880s and 1890s, driven by antisemitic and pan-national mobilization, overwhelmed a class that had governed through social prestige and rational-bureaucratic norms rather than organized popular constituencies. The scions of this elite responded not with political reorganization but with the celebrated aesthetic retreat into fin-de-siècle modernism—a sublimation of political defeat into cultural production that Schorske reads as a symptom of structural weakness. Freifeld’s [Reference Freifeld2000] parallel study of Hungary documents how liberal nationalism there, despite its deep roots in the 1848 tradition and its mastery of public commemorative culture, was progressively overwhelmed by the gentry-dominated political machine and the rise of nationalist mass politics long before the war. Janos [Reference Janos1982] provides a more systematic world-systemic account: liberalism in peripheral European states was structurally fragile not because of imperial collapse but because the world-economy’s division of labor confined such states to patterns of economic development incompatible with sustaining a strong bourgeoisie as a political class.

These alternative explanations cannot be dismissed. They identify real processes operative in the Polish case as well: the structural weakness of the Central European bourgeoisie relative to the landowning classes, the role of mass-politics mobilization in destroying liberal notability politics, and the world-systemic constraints on peripheral capitalist development. The field-rescaling framework proposed here would be incomplete if it treated imperial rescaling as sufficient rather than as a necessary component of a multi-causal explanation. The comparative literature on European parliamentary representation provides a further corrective perspective: Best and Cotta’s [Reference Best and Cotta2000] long-run analysis of legislative recruitment across eleven European countries documents a pan-European structural shift—from the Honoratiorenvertretung of the mid-19th century, in which landed aristocrats and wealthy notables dominated assemblies by virtue of social standing rather than organizational capacity, toward professionalized political classes embedded in mass party organizations. The erosion of liberal notable elites was germinating across the continent from the 1880s onward, only to varying degrees retarded by the residues of monarchical constitutional frameworks. From this perspective, what happened in Poland and the wider successor-state region after 1918 was not a unique structural rupture but a dramatic acceleration of processes already underway throughout Europe, in which the sudden removal of monarchical institutional constraints—itself a product of both military defeat and imperial disintegration—exposed with unusual speed the structural obsolescence of a declining political type. Hein-Kircher and Kalilitz’s concept of the “double transformation” is particularly apposite here: post-imperial successor states were required to accomplish simultaneously what Western European polities managed sequentially—both national consolidation and democratic mass-politicization of the citizenry [Hein-Kircher and Kailitz Reference Hein-kircher and Kailitz2018]. This simultaneity imposed on Polish liberal notables a two-front competition—against both nationalist mass parties and socialist labor movements—without the temporal buffer that had allowed liberal elites in France or Britain to adapt more gradually to democratic pressures.

The field-rescaling model proposed in this paper is thus best understood not as a replacement for these structural and comparative-historical accounts but as a specification of the mechanisms through which broader structural tendencies were articulated in the Polish case. The world-systemic weakness of the Central European bourgeoisie conditioned the field’s configuration from below; the monarchical-imperial institutional framework had delayed the organizational transformation of that field from above; the 1918 rescaling, by simultaneously destroying the economic foundations of the dominant faction and eliminating the institutional constraints that had decelerated mass-party competition, catalyzed with exceptional speed a transformation that structural factors alone would have produced more gradually. Field theory contributes to this synthesis by identifying precisely how the transition occurred—through the loss of specific conversion mechanisms, the reorganization of the hierarchy of capital types, and the emergence of new legitimation principles in the institutionalized national field of power—rather than merely why it was structurally possible.

Sub-Field Rescaling: Empirical Resonances

The theoretical argument advanced here can be productively situated relative to a body of historical scholarship that, while not employing Bourdieusian field theory, explores sub-field rescaling at levels of empirical granularity that this paper’s macro-theoretical scope cannot achieve. Attending to this literature both strengthens the proposed framework and clarifies what a field-theoretical perspective can contribute in return.

The most direct empirical complement is Rigó’s [Reference Rigó2022] study of business elites in the borderlands of Austria-Hungary and the German Empire during the Great War period. Tracing the careers of industrialists and bankers in Alsace-Lorraine and Transylvania, Rigó shows that business elites were not simply destroyed by imperial collapse but had to renegotiate their accumulated capital under radically altered political conditions. Ethnic minority industrialists who had cultivated resources in multiple imperial fields simultaneously succeeded most readily—a pattern corresponding closely to the logic of the trans-imperial proto-field elaborated above. Read through the lens proposed here, Rigó’s industrialists were actors whose position depended not on any single national field but on the conversion possibilities available within wider imperial fields of power; the post-1918 rescaling curtailed those possibilities dramatically, even when it did not destroy firms outright. Egry’s [Reference Egry2022] related work on the local mechanics of elite transition across the Habsburg successor states—in Transylvania, Moravia, and the new Austrian rump state—confirms that the 1918 transition was neither a clean break nor simple continuation but a reconfiguration of the terms on which capital could be accumulated and legitimized: precisely what field theory is equipped to model.

Wheatley’s [Reference Wheatley2023] intellectual history of sovereignty in the Habsburg successor states illuminates the juridical sub-field as a site of particularly acute rescaling. Central European jurists confronting the implosion of an empire that had never fitted standard theories of singular sovereignty were forced to innovate entirely new conceptual frameworks for the birth and death of states. Legal capital accumulated by practitioners such as Kelsen and Jellinek within the multinational imperial context could not simply transfer into any single national field; it had to be partially reconstituted, and in the process generated foundational concepts of modern international law. The lawyers and parliamentarians who had operated simultaneously in St. Petersburg’s Duma, Vienna’s Reichsrat, and Berlin’s Reichstag were forced after 1918 to work within a single national legal field whose institutional logic differed fundamentally from any of the imperial contexts in which they had trained—rendering intelligible the institutional brittleness of liberal parties in the new Poland as a consequence of field rescaling rather than personal or ideological failure. Richter’s [Reference Richter2020] analysis of fragmentation in the post-1918 successor states demonstrates that new national borders severed century-old commercial, communicative, and social networks—networks that had constituted the material substratum of the trans-imperial proto-field—providing the economic micro-foundation for the process theorized here at the level of elite capital configurations. Petruccelli’s [Reference Petruccelli2025] study of the origins of Interpol documents how the collapse of the Habsburg imperial order, by dissolving existing frameworks of criminal jurisdiction and extradition, created demand for new forms of international policing cooperation; the Central European police officials who founded the International Criminal Police Commission in Vienna in 1923 were experts whose trans-imperial professional capital had become illegible within successor-state national fields but who found new opportunities by pioneering an explicitly post-national institutional framework—another instance of interstitial emergence in Mann’s sense. Finally, Mazurek’s [Reference Mazurek2018] research on the Polish origins of global developmentalism argues that economists such as Kalecki and Landau developed their heterodox frameworks precisely because Poland’s truncated post-imperial economic field denied them the institutional resources available to their Western counterparts. The constraint imposed by a small national field, cut off from the Russian market that had driven pre-1918 industrial growth and from the institutional resources of the former empires, generated both economic stagnation and, paradoxically, intellectual innovation: cultural capital that could not find institutional expression within the conservative economic orthodoxies of the Second Republic’s national field was redirected toward theoretical work of ultimately global reach.

The successful conversions of intellectual capital described above pertained, however, predominantly to the younger generation—those who had completed their education at imperial universities and thereby gained access to transnational scientific networks while remaining unencumbered by deep investment in imperial institutional positions. For older actors whose careers had been built within the imperial field itself, conversion proved far more difficult. No case illustrates this more sharply than that of Aleksander Lednicki: an elite lawyer serving the largest Russian and Polish businesses, co-founder of the Cadet Party, and a leading figure of the Polish liberal movement, who during the brief Russian Republic of 1917 was appointed by the Lvov-Kerensky government as chairman of the Liquidation Commission for the Kingdom of Poland with ministerial rank, and subsequently served as representative of the Regency Council in Russia [Wise Reference Wise2003]. After 1918, having relocated to Warsaw, he found himself on the margins of the newly established field of power. He attempted to reconvert his legal capital by representing Western—American and French—investors entering the Polish market, but following a scandal connected to one of these transactions, he took his own life in 1934. His career had flourished precisely insofar as the imperial space endured; within it, he had operated simultaneously in the autonomous subfield of Polish politics and in the emerging transnational legal field. The trajectory recalls the configuration that Dezalay and Garth [Reference Dezalay and Garth2002] describe in their analysis of lawyers and imperial power: as a dominant power reorganizes its sphere of influence, a legal field emerges that organizes and legitimizes economic dependence while generating its own transnational autonomy. Lednicki’s attempt after 1918 to occupy an analogous position—now serving Western rather than Russian capital—failed because his accumulated status was anchored entirely in the Russian imperial space, leaving him unrecognizable as a peer within the American or French legal fields. Leon Petrażycki, the great liberal legal theorist who became a professor at the University of Warsaw after 1918, offers a parallel instance of the same structural predicament—high intellectual standing combined with progressive marginalization in a national field reorganized on terms that had no place for the forms of capital accumulated under empire—and one that ended, in 1931, in the same way [Zarycki Reference Zarycki2022].

Taken together, these studies illuminate the rescaling of the Central European fields of power not from above—as this paper has largely done—but from the vantage point of specific sub-fields and their concrete human actors. The convergence of their findings with the theoretical model proposed here is instructive: the concept of a trans-imperial space of elite integration, and its reconfiguration through rescaling, can supply an integrating theoretical framework for what remains, in this growing historical literature, a largely descriptive body of empirical observation. Conversely, the empirical density of these histories points to the kinds of detailed sub-field studies—of banking networks, legal professions, parliamentary groups, criminal police, and economic expertise—that could test, refine, and extend the sociological argument presented in this paper.

Modalities of Rescaling: Toward a Comparative Typology

The typology introduced above can now be developed against the backdrop of the Polish case. Even within the single conjuncture of 1918, rescaling took qualitatively distinct forms depending on the relationship between the proto-field of power, the collapsing imperial macro-field, and the state structure—or absence thereof—into which the proto-field was being reconfigured. Poland, as the preceding sections have shown, represents nationally bounded rescaling with elite displacement: the factions most deeply embedded in the Russian imperial field, above all the economic bourgeoisie and the liberal intelligentsia, lost the conversion mechanisms on which their positions had depended, while those fractions of the intelligentsia whose capital was least dependent on imperial institutional structures proved most capable of reorienting to the new national field.

A contrasting case is offered by those nations for whom rescaling did not produce a bounded national field at all but rather deepened existing patterns of dispersion. The Armenian case is paradigmatic: the destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923, combined with the Sovietization of what became the Armenian SSR, meant that the Armenian proto-field of power was not rescaled into a field of power of a national state but was instead fragmented across diasporic communities in which no single institutional framework could generate the metacapital characteristic of Bourdieu’s national field. The result was a persistent condition of proto-field existence, with transnational cultural capital remaining the primary resource of elites unable to convert it through a sovereign state apparatus [Tabar Reference Tabar2020]. The contrast with Poland is instructive: what can be seen as the Polish proto-field, for all its trans-imperial character, was ultimately rescaled into a state at significant cost; the Armenian proto-field was prevented from completing that transition by physical annihilation and geopolitical foreclosure.

A further modality is asymmetric absorption into a core-state field, exemplified by Romania. Here a proto-field of power that had long gravitated around a core nation-state—the Old Kingdom, formally independent since 1878—provided the institutional anchor for the incorporation of Transylvanian, Bessarabian, and Bukovinian elites after 1918. The rescaling was thus asymmetric: rather than constructing a national field of power from scratch, as in the Polish case, Romanian elites from the Habsburg successor territories were absorbed into a pre-existing field of power on terms largely set by Bucharest [Egry Reference Egry2022]. The frictions generated by this absorption—between Transylvanian and Regat elites, between different legal cultures, and between competing economic orientations—are the symptomatic tensions of an uneven rescaling in which the proto-field’s internal differentiation was not dissolved but merely subordinated.

Yugoslavia represents a still more complex modality: contested rescaling under a composite state. The Southern Slav proto-field of power entering 1918 was not one but several partially overlapping proto-fields—Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian—each with its own capital structure, its own relationship to the collapsing Habsburg and Ottoman orders, and its own competing vision of the post-imperial field. The Yugoslav state institutionalized their rivalry within a single, internally unstable field of power [Connelly Reference Connelly2020]. The Serbian elite, whose proto-field had been anchored in an existing sovereign state, occupied a position analogous to the Romanian Regat elite, while Croatian and Slovenian elites, emerging from the Habsburg field, found themselves in a structurally subordinate position.

Finally, the Hungarian case illustrates truncated rescaling: a proto-field that had exercised genuine co-dominance within the Habsburg dual monarchy was suddenly compressed into a rump state stripped of the territories, resources, and populations over which it had previously exerted power. The Hungarian landed and bureaucratic elite lost not merely conversion mechanisms but the very spatial and demographic scale on which its dominant position had been premised [Rigó Reference Rigó2022]. The result was a field of power characterized by acute over-accumulation of political capital relative to economic capital in interwar Hungary with a displaced imperial bureaucracy seeking to reassert its dominance in a diminished arena. In Poland, by contrast, it was the intelligentsia’s cultural capital that filled the vacuum left by the weakened economic elite.

The five modalities outlined above all represent contractive rescaling. As noted in the theoretical discussion, the same conjuncture also generated expansive trajectories, three of which are directly relevant to the Central European context. Riga’s [Reference Riga2012] analysis of the Bolsheviks demonstrates that they were drawn disproportionately from the empire’s ethnic minorities—Poles, Latvians, Jews, Georgians—or from those offered marginal status or ideological incompatibility by the new national fields; the Comintern thus functioned partly as an alternative rescaling mechanism in which political capital could be reconverted under principles unavailable within any successor state. The agrarian internationals—the Green International and the Soviet-sponsored Krestintern, whose Polish participants included figures such as Tomasz Dąbal—similarly mobilized transnational solidarities that cut across rather than conformed to the new national fields [Beneš Reference Beneš Jakub2025]. The Promethean networks, by contrast, represent expansive rescaling by a national state: Piłsudski’s Poland actively sponsored émigré coalitions of non-Russian peoples whose own proto-fields had failed to institutionalize in 1918–1921 [Garboś Reference Garboś2019]. What links all three theoretically is that each assigned positive value to precisely the forms of capital that the new national fields were structured to devalue. The expansive trajectories thus do not refute the contractive model but reinforce its central claim: rescaling systematically produces winners and losers, and displacement from a national field does not necessarily mean elimination from political life.

These five modalities do not exhaust the empirical range of post-imperial transitions. The concept of rescaling nonetheless offers a vocabulary for comparing such trajectories systematically, one that neither reduces them to the nationalist teleologies of conventional historiography nor dissolves their specificity into a uniform account of imperial collapse.