Poland: Economic History Debate Across the Iron Curtain

The Polish chapter aims to identify and provide an explanation for the relative impact of Polish economic historiography on the post-1945 international academic debate concerning the origins of capitalism in early modern Europe. The Annales school, Prato seminars, and IEHA in the era of charismatic researcher and efficient academic manager Fernand Braudel played a crucial role in establishing academic cooperation with Polish historians across the Iron Curtain. These organizations and contacts constituted the main institutional framework that allowed Polish historians’ research results to enter the international debate on the origins of capitalism and the rise of the West. Yet, Polish exile historians were both disinvited and self-excluded from this international intellectual circulation for ideological reasons. The works of Witold Kula and Marian Małowist, convinced Marxists but relatively independent from Party orthodoxy, influenced the course of the debate and the image of Eastern Europe’s past.