3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Marching in place, May 31, 2008
When the papers in the book were presented at a conference in 1984, the question of why Eastern Europe had lagged Western Europe economically for so many centuries was purely academic. Whatever had happened in the past, the reason the East continued to lag was obvious.
Now things have changed, and there is a practical reason for asking what factors retarded the East from reaching "take off."
The seven academics -- from America, Hungary, Poland and Germany --were concerned to throw cold water on world system theory, an idea associated most prominently with Immanuel Wallerstein.
This theory blames the rich for the stagnation of the poor and has been used to blame America for the backwardness of Latin America.
The authors convincingly show that, whatever merit world system theory may have elsewhere, it cannot account for the fact that Eastern Europe failed to industrialize and, to a great extent, failed even to modernize its agriculture.
For example, the sharecropping farms called ciftlik that arose in the Ottoman Balkans did not, for the most part, deal in exports to the rich countries, did not arise in the time sequence required by world system theory and, most damning for the theory, did not produce allegedly harmful foreign investment in the backward areas.
The authors offer a variety of ideas about why Eastern Europe remained poor, always riffing off Bohemia, which (somewhat dubiously) is assigned to the east although it is difficult on objective measurements to separate it from the west. The Czechs may have been a distant people of whom the English politicians knew nothing -- although English entrepreneurs had been very successful there from the early 18th century -- but by most objective measurements they were as western as the west.
The authors do not consider Austria part of the east.
The seven authors are stimulating in their frankness. I doubt a book with "backwardness" in the title would be issued by an American academic press these days.
They cover a lot of ground. But two things are missing.
One is any assignment of influence to religion. The Hungarian Peter Gunst does wonder, in an endnote, if the lack of a Reformation affected the east (Bohemia, of course, had one); and the American John Lampe does mention the hostility of the Moslem clergy to technology, but only as a rather late effect.
To my mind, the dead hand of religion, whether Catholic, Orthodox or Moslem, didn't affect only social relations, it must have affected economic ones as well. (Whether Judaism might have had an economic effect would be a moot question, since the Jews were so hindered by legal barriers that they remained very poor. Catholicism and Orthodoxy certainly deserve some of the blame for the antiJewish laws and at least in that respect, religion retarded economic improvement.)
Also, for 500 years, the eastern Baltic had a large trade and a big balance of payments in its favor with Britain for naval stores. If you are going to attack world system theory, here is a vulnerable point. The authors do not mention it, presumably on the grounds that both in geographical reach and in proportion of total production, naval stores were a minor component of the east's output. Still, minor components are thought to have been the settings for take-off in other places.
The concepts in "The Origins of Backwardness" can be readily applied to many other current issues.
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