As the centenary of the Great Depression approaches, this book offers a historical study of its impact on Eastern Europe. Due to its agricultural dominance this region was particularly hard hit. The volume focuses on ten states of the interwar period that had emerged from the Ottoman, Romanov, Habsburg, and Hohenzollern empires and where national sovereignty was particularly contested. The contributing authors apply an integrative approach that uses economic change as a starting point for analysing socio-institutional changes and political realignments. They review the main responses that the respective countries have made to try to mitigate the impact of the crises, such as economic protectionism or the construction of welfare states. The contributions also examine the profound impact of the Depression on the relationship between societies and states, between genders, between social classes, and between different nationalities. By moving the study of economic nationalism from economic history to the center of social and political history, the volume contributes to a much better understanding of states, societies and nationalism in Eastern Europe in the 1930s.

Klaus Richter is a Professor in Central and Eastern European history at the University of Birmingham. He has published widely on the modern history of the region located between Russia and Germany, i.e. especially modern-day Poland, the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine. He is the principal investigator of the project The Liminality of Failing Democracy: East Central Europe during the Interwar Slump. His first monograph addressed Christian-Jewish relations in pre-1914 Lithuania (Antisemitismus in Litauen: Christen, Juden und die ‘Emanzipation’ der Bauern, 1889-1914). His second monograph Fragmentation in East Central Europe: Poland and the Baltics, 1915–1929 (Oxford University Press, 2020) has received the Biennial Book Prize of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies in 2022.Anca Mândru worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Gerda Henkel funded project, “The Liminality of Failing Democracy: East Central Europe during the Interwar Slump,” at the University of Birmingham, 2021-2023. She received her PhD in Eastern European History in 2019, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 2024, she is an International Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI), where she is completing a monograph on the Left in Romania before World War One.Jasmin Nithammer is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Gerda Henkel funded project, “The Liminality of Failing Democracy: East Central Europe during the Interwar Slump,” at the University of Birmingham, 2021-2023. She joined the University of Birmingham in 2018 to work on the project “The Fight Against the Traffic in Women and Children in Interwar Poland” (funded by the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung). She has also published a monograph on the Polish and Czechoslovak borders during the Cold War (Grenzen des Sozialismus zu Land und zu Wasser: Die tschechoslowakische Landgrenze und polnische Seegrenze im Vergleich).

List of Tables and Figures
1 Introduction - Klaus Richter, Jasmin Nithammer, and Anca Mândru
PART ONE
Eastern Europe’s Great Depression in Its International Context
2 The League of Nations, Eastern Europe, and the Great Depression - Klaus Richter, Jasmin Nithammer, and Anca Mândru
3 Austria: The Toll of Economic Orthodoxy - Nathan Marcus
4 Poland: Foreign Capital and Economic Nationalism during the Great Depression - Jerzy .azor
PART TWO
Business Networks during the Great Depression 97
5 Czechoslovakia: “The Last Straw”: Bat’a and Endicott-Johnson during and after the Great Depression - Zachary Doleshal
6 Latvia: Between Economic Recovery and the Great Depression: Multi-ethnic Entrepreneurship, Fragmentation, Nationalization - Katja Wezel
PART THREE
Changing Relations between State and Society
7 Estonia: “Is This the Estonia We Wanted?” How the Interwar Slump Reshaped Estonia’s Society - David Feest
8 Lithuania: The Great Depression, Social Divisions, and Economic Nationalism - Klaus Richter
9 Romania: Serving Fewer by Design: Austerity Welfare Politics during the Great Depression - Alexandra Ghi.
PART FOUR
The Depression as Catalyst for Economic and Political Thought
10 Hungary: Social and Political Consequences of the Great Depression - Béla Tomka
11 Bulgaria: Economic Thought and Structural Change during the Great Depression - Nikolay Nenovsky and Tsvetelina Marinova
12 Greece: Institutional Strategies and Political Actors in a Period of Increasing Economic Protectionism - Catherine Brégianni Conclusion 333
13 The Watershed Moment of Eastern Europe’s Interwar - Klaus Richter, Jasmin Nithammer, and Anca Mândru
Contributors
Index