# Escape Ecologies: Peasants, Nature, and Power in Eastern Europe, 1700-1850 ![Illustration, Logo](/sites/g/files/omnuum9471/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2025-11/Screenshot%202025-11-04%20at%202.02.55%E2%80%AFPM.png?itok=abF6a3Yk) #### calendar\_today Date and Time **November 18, 2025** 04:00PM - 05:00PM EST #### pin\_drop Location **MIT, E-51, room 275, MIT campus, Cambridge MA** MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society Speaker: **Michał Pospiszyl** --- 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. [More information](https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__sts-2Dprogram.mit.edu_events_list_&d=DwMF-A&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=HKPxmUdnYUKWMx8pouzTcDfH7LlrI74AKC20L52AMiE&m=_X3Xrp4ji9mYHfjoRA2Ijexm0Am5vTgiUl_VYFVsNucwTPdEBxwknrRjWYdiHciE&s=I-2QJHsZ8WDf64rwAnOcDo1WADHm7kNTHTjR2tAVlLg&e=) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#) Save: [ Add to calendar calendar\_today ](https://earlymodernworld.fas.harvard.edu/node/1936336/event-feed.ics) Copy link link