East Central Europe in the Modern World


Book Description

A study of East Central Europe and its place in the modern world. Combining narrative with analysis, it presents the past and present of East Central Europe in the larger context of the political and economic history of the continent.




Globalized Peripheries


Book Description

Globalized Peripheries examines the commodity flows and financial ties within Central and Eastern Europe in order to situate these regions as important contributors to Atlantic trade networks.




Historical Atlas of Central Europe


Book Description

Central Europe remains a region of ongoing change and continuing significance in the contemporary world. This third, fully revised edition of the Historical Atlas of Central Europe takes into consideration recent changes in the region. The 120 full-colour maps, each accompanied by an explanatory text, provide a concise visual survey of political, economic, demographic, cultural, and religious developments from the fall of the Roman Empire in the early fifth century to the present. No less than 19 countries are the subject of this atlas. In terms of today's borders, those countries include Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus in the north; the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, and Slovakia in the Danubian Basin; and Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, and Greece in the Balkans. Much attention is also given to areas immediately adjacent to the central European core: historic Prussia, Venetia, western Anatolia, and Ukraine west of the Dnieper River. Embedded in the text are 48 updated administrative and statistical tables. The value of the Historical Atlas of Central Europe as an authoritative reference tool is further enhanced by an extensive bibliography and a gazetteer of place names - in up to 29 language variants - that appear on the maps and in the text. The Historical Atlas of Central Europe is an invaluable resource for scholars, students, journalists, and general readers who wish to have a fuller understanding of this critical area, with its many peoples, languages, and continued political upheaval.




Patterns of Migration in Central Europe


Book Description

Patterns of Migration in Central Europe brings together new material on migration in the region: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In the last ten years, these countries have changed from being countries of emigration to countries of immigration. As the next candidates for membership to the European Union, migration has become a particularly important topic for these countries. This book is designed as a key text for those interested in the development of the region and in European migration more generally.







Why Did Europe Conquer the World?


Book Description

The startling economic and political answers behind Europe's historical dominance Between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe. But why did Europe establish global dominance, when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and South Asians were far more advanced? In Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, Philip Hoffman demonstrates that conventional explanations—such as geography, epidemic disease, and the Industrial Revolution—fail to provide answers. Arguing instead for the pivotal role of economic and political history, Hoffman shows that if certain variables had been different, Europe would have been eclipsed, and another power could have become master of the world. Hoffman sheds light on the two millennia of economic, political, and historical changes that set European states on a distinctive path of development, military rivalry, and war. This resulted in astonishingly rapid growth in Europe's military sector, and produced an insurmountable lead in gunpowder technology. The consequences determined which states established colonial empires or ran the slave trade, and even which economies were the first to industrialize. Debunking traditional arguments, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? reveals the startling reasons behind Europe's historic global supremacy.




Central Europe


Book Description

Throughout the ages, small nations struggled valiantly against a series of imperial powers - Ottoman Turkey, Habsburg Austria, imperial Germany, czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union - and they lost regularly. Johnson's account is present-minded in the best sense: in describing actual historical events, he illustrates the ways they have been remembered, and how they contribute to the national assumptions that still drive European politics today.




Central Europe in the High Middle Ages


Book Description

A groundbreaking comparative history of the formation of Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, from their origins in the eleventh century.




Contacts, Boundaries and Innovation in the Fifth Millennium


Book Description

The fifth millennium is characterized by far-flung contacts and a veritable flood of innovations. While its beginning is still strongly reminiscent of a broadly Linearbandkeramik way of life, at its end we find new, inter-regionally valid forms of symbolism, representation and ritual behaviour, changes in the settlement system, in architecture and in routine life. Yet, these inter-regional tendencies are paired with a profusion of increasingly small-scale archaeological cultures, many of them defined through pottery only. This tension between large-scale interaction and more local developments remains ill understood, largely because inter-regional comparisons are lacking. Contributors in this volume provide up-to-date regional overviews of the main developments in the fifth millennium and discuss, amongst others, in how far ceramically-defined 'cultures' can be seen as spatially coherent social groups with their own way of life and worldview, and how processes of innovation can be understood. Case studies range from the Neolithisation of the Netherlands, hunter-gatherer - farmer fusions in the Polish Lowlands, to the Italian Neolithic. Amongst others, they cover the circulation of stone disc-rings in western Europe, the formation of post-LBK societies in central Europe and the reliability of pottery as an indicator for social transformations.




Austerities and Aspirations


Book Description

This monograph provides an analysis of the economic performance and living standard in Czechoslovakia and its successor states, Hungary, and Poland since 1945. The novelty of the book lies in its broad comparative perspective: it places East Central Europe in a wider European framework that underlines the themes of regional disparities and European commonalities. Going beyond the traditional growth paradigm, the author systematically studies the historical patterns of consumption, leisure, and quality of life—aspects that Tomka argues can best be considered in relation to one other. By adopting this “triple approach,” he undertakes a truly interdisciplinary research drawing from history, economics, sociology, and demography. As a result of Tomka’s three-pillar comparative analysis, the book makes a major contribution to the debates on the dynamics of economic growth in communist and postcommunist East Central Europe, on the socialist consumer culture along with its transformation after 1990, and on how the accounts on East Central Europe can be integrated into the emerging field of historical quality of life research.