Escape Ecologies: Peasants, Nature, and Power in Eastern Europe, 1700-1850
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Michał Pospiszyl traces how the presence of escape ecologies (forests, swamps, wastelands) influenced the relationship between subjects and centers of power (nobility and state) in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the disasters at the turn of the eighteenth century—the Little Ice Age, eighty years of continuous warfare, epidemics, and economic collapse and depopulation-- affected all social strata, the weakening of state repression and the growth of forests, floodplains, and wastelands caused the eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to become a place of mass in-migration, particularly from surrounding Enlightenment monarchies. For many people in Central and Eastern Europe, migrating to a country with ample hiding places, easy access to the commons, and significant privileges for folk colonizers was more appealing than living under the repressive systems of emergent modern states.
Michał Pospiszyl is a historian and Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.