When Anna Sosnowska's book originally appeared in 2004, it clashed with a celebratory mood in Poland. With European Union accession imminent, it seemed that the country was finally “returning to Europe,” and convergence would follow suit. The book challenged this narrative by looking into an unlikely place: a historical debate from the communist era.
Sosnowska, whose work now appears in English with minor changes, concerns herself with backwardness, by which she understands observable differences in development indicators in comparison to western Europe. She studies the debate of Polish post-war historians concerning the origins of such differences in eastern Europe. These researchers aimed to establish the timing, causes, and evolution of backwardness, and whether the region had followed a different development path from the one taken by the west. Sosnowska argues that the concepts produced during the debate remain useful for contemporary research on development, and help challenge the modernization paradigm.
The book is divided into five chapters, with the first two serving as an introduction. Chapter 1 starts with a description of historical sociology, a field in which Sosnowska somewhat unconvincingly tries to place the analyzed debate. It then follows with an overview of international explanations of east European backwardness. Chapter 2 introduces the four historians who shaped the Polish debate: Marian Małowist, Witold Kula, Andrzej Wyczański, and Jerzy Topolski. It also discusses their relationship with Marxism, a particularly strong inspiration for Kula and Topolski.
In the next three chapters, Sosnowska analyzes the debate itself. She first studies the geography of development (Chapter 3), asking what parts of Europe were conceptualized as backwards. She then moves to competing models of backwardness (Chapter 4), and finally to social stratification in Poland (Chapter 5). In the latter chapter, Sosnowska analyzes whom the Polish historians conceptualized as victims and beneficiaries of backwardness, and whom as supporters of development.
Of the three, Chapter 4 is the most compelling. After a brief overview of international development theories, Sosnowska skillfully recreates the four competing models, based on close reading of the authors’ extensive publications. Małowist bases his theory, which Immanuel Wallerstein acknowledged as an inspiration, on a colonial interpretation of eastern Europe's history; Wyczański disagrees, and argues that eastern Europe consciously tried to catch up to more advanced countries; Topolski points to the region's development as a consequence of unlucky circumstances; finally, Kula, who cooperated with historians from the Annales School, presents a model of hybrid development of an agrarian society evolving in the shadow of western capitalism. Most of the authors (excluding Wyczański) understand eastern Europe to have developed differently from western Europe, and not merely followed the same path at a slower pace. They saw backwardness as a structural problem, caused by local institutions and, for Małowist and Kula, the influence of the developing west.
As a work on communist-era intellectual history, Sosnowska's book convincingly shows that even that period saw a fertile exchange of ideas between western and eastern historians. Despite ideological pressure, researchers in Poland went beyond Marxism and produced important interpretations, which proved relevant in other countries. Since the book's publication in Polish, others have shown a similar path taken by the Polish School of Development, which evolved in economic milieu in parallel to the debate studied by Sosnowska. Its representatives, such as Oskar Lange, Michał Kalecki, and Ignacy Sachs also pondered questions of backwardness and development, and charted an intellectual course beyond orthodox Marxism.
As a modern methodological argument for abandoning the modernization paradigm, Sosnowska's book is also a compelling if uneven read. Originally tailored for the Polish audience at the turn of the millennium, the book's erudite theoretical chapter introductions are not always adequately linked with later analysis. Some parts, such as Chapter 2, could have been made more approachable to an international reader. However, in an era when economic history is on an increasing scale dominated by cliometrics, Sosnowska's analysis is a powerful case for the merits of source-based longue durée research, grounded in rich theoretical discussions. It is a significant resource for scholars working on eastern Europe's economic and social history, and the author's insights on development and the deep roots of backwardness extend beyond the region and its relationship with the west.
