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France was interwar Poland’s main ally, and the biggest source of the country’s foreign investment. The two roles were closely connected: Paris used its position in Warsaw to win preferential treatment for its firms, while Polish authorities depended on France to finance their modernization policies and military spending. The relationship’s asymmetric character bred conflict, and in the 1930s dissenting voices compared French actions in Poland to imperialism and colonial expansion. This book untangles the complex mix of economics, policy, and politics in Franco-Polish relations. Based on government and company-level sources, it evaluates the part played by French capital in Poland and ...
Drawing on newly accessible archives as well as memoirs and other sources, this biographical dictionary documents the lives of some two thousand notable figures in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. A unique compendium of information that is not currently available in any other single resource, the dictionary provides concise profiles of the region's most important historical and cultural actors, from Ivo Andric to King Zog. Coverage includes Albania, Belarus, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Moldova, Ukraine, and the countries that made up Yugoslavia.
This book is the second volume in a trilogy that traces the development of the academic subject of International Relations, or what was often referred to in the interwar years as International Studies. In this volume, the author begins with the 1932 Mission to China and conference in Milan, examines the International Studies Conference, reviews the Hoover Plan, the MacDonald Plan, the fate of the World Disarmament Conference, and the League of Nations’ role in the discipline. This one of a kind project takes on the task of reviewing the development of IR, aptly published in celebration of the discipline’s centenary.
The concept of ‘culture’ is a relatively modern invention. It stems from the Latin term cultura meaning cultivation. Cicero was the first to use this word in a non-agricultural context. In his Tusculanae Disputationes he reflected on the ‘cultivation of the soul’ (cultura animi). Later this term was rarely used in this sense but as of the 17th century more and more authors considered culture an intellectual and not an agricultural phenomenon. Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) described culture as a vehicle overcoming natural barbarism. He was followed by German philosophers of culture. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) argued that human creativity was as important as human rationali...
Much attention has been given to the role of intellectual dissidents, labor, and religion in the historic overthrow of communism in Poland during the 1980s. Books Are Weapons presents the first English-language study of that which connected them—the press. Siobhan Doucette provides a comprehensive examination of the Polish opposition’s independent, often underground, press and its crucial role in the events leading to the historic Round Table and popular elections of 1989. While other studies have emphasized the role that the Solidarity movement played in bringing about civil society in 1980-1981, Doucette instead argues that the independent press was the essential binding element in the...
What is East Central Europe? Can it be defined with any precision? The question of definition is a difficult one as is ussually the case concerning borderlands whose historical developments show little continuity and an uncertain identity born of the conflict between aspirations and reality. It is in East Central Europe that „no peace settlement is ever final, no frontiers are secure and each generation must begin its work anew”. Is there any chance that this definition will become out of date?
"An exploration of prewar and postwar power relations in Russia's Smolensk amid Stalinism and Nazism in Russia's Smolensk. The book investigates how lived experiences shaped people's fateful choices and how ordinary people sustained the twentieth century's two most murderous regimes"--
Between working men and women (which may include “free” wage earners, chattel slaves, indentured labourers, sharecroppers, domestic servants, and many others) and those employing them, there has always been a constant – mostly silent but sometimes overt – struggle concerning employers’ discretionary power and over the interpretation of formal and informal rules. There is a constantly shifting frontier of control, that is, an ongoing struggle for control in the workplace, with managers and supervisors trying to increase their power over their subordinates, and their subordinates, in reaction, trying to maintain and increase their relative autonomy. The detailed case studies in this ...
The subject of this book is the economic backwardness of Poland and Eastern Europe in the modern era. The studies in the first part analyse various aspects of the region's economic and social history in the period from the 16th to the 20th centuries, such as the nature of peasant economics, the character of economic evolution, and the ambiguity of social and economic relations between Poland and "the West". The second part deals with the change following the fall of state socialism. Papers in this part argue that, for understanding the present, it is necessary to take into consideration historical legacies. It is also important to look at the process of this recent change comparatively, both within Eastern Europe and comparing this region with other parts of the world. Professor Kochanowicz's contention in these essays is that the so-called transformation has had to cope not only with the effects of state socialism, but also with a much longer legacy of backwardness.