Carolina Seminar with Małgorzata Mazurek (Columbia University)

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, emigration and industrialization served as the main developmental “solutions.” This presentation investigates how socialists, ethno-nationalists, and international organizations dramatized the tension between emigration and industrialization on a global scale as the distinction emerged simultaneously in economics. In these debates, industrialization as an international development policy emerged from the failure of emigration to become a viable alternative. Poland and agrarian Europe played a central role in this paradigm shift, as they were targets of these policies and specific cases of global rural poverty.

Małgorzata Mazurek is an associate professor of Polish studies at Columbia University. She specializes in modern history of Poland and East Central Europe. Her research interests include history of social sciences, international development, social history of labor and consumption in the twentieth-century Poland and Polish-Jewish relations. Her book, “Society in Waiting Lines: On Experiences of Shortages in Postwar Poland” (Warsaw: Trio 2010; in Polish) was shortlisted among the ten best books on contemporary Polish history.
 
The Carolina Seminar: Russia and Its Empires, East and West is co-sponsored by the Carolina Seminar Program, the UNC Department of History, and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies. Please note that the participants will give an overview of their projects, but will not read a formal paper. Instead, papers or book chapters will be circulated ahead of time to those who are interested in attending and participating in the discussion. Please contact Dr. Eren Tasar for more information.