Chapter 5
THE TRANSFORMATION OF EASTERN EUROPE., 1648-1740
IN EASTERN EUROPE, in the century after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, it became apparent that political systems that failed to become more "modern" might be in danger of going out of existence. In the mid-seventeeth century most parts of Eastern Europe belonged to one or another of three old-fashioned political organizations- the Holy Roman Empire, the Republic of Poland, and the empire of the Ottoman Turks. All three were loose, decentralized, and increasingly ineffective. They were superseded by three new and stronger powers -- Prussia, Austria, and Russia. These three by overrunning the intermediate ground of Poland, came to adjoin one another and cover all Eastern Europe except the Balkans. It was in this same period that Russia expanded territorially, adopted some of the technical and administrative apparatus of western Europe, and became and active participant in European affairs.
East and West are of course relative terms. For the Russians Germany and even Poland were "western." But for Europe as a whole a sgnificant though indefinite social and economic line ran along the Elbe and the bohemian Mountains to the head of the Adriatic Sea. East of this line towns were fewer than in the West, human labor was less productive and middle classes were less strong. Above all, the peasants were governed by their landlords. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, in eastern Europe in contrast to what happened in the West, the peasant mass increasingly lost its freedom. The commercial revolution and widening of the market created a strong merchant class in western Europe and tended to turn working people into a legally free and mobile labor force. In eastern Europe these changes strengthened the great landlords who produced for export and who secured their labor force by the institutions of serfdom and "hereditary subjection." ...
