The book offers a transnational perspective on history of communism in East-Central Europe. It analyzes the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of communist systems and focuses on different forms of resistance and ways of its remembering. The transnational look is manifested through an analysis of the usefulness of the models applied in research of the past, an investigation of some historical phenomena in the context of mutual relations between particular countries (e.g. Poland and East Germany), republics of Soviet Union (Lithuania, Moldova, and Russia) and between the East and the West relations (peace movement in Poland and Netherlands). Moreover, selected aspects of the past (consumerism in Bulgaria or economic management in Romania) are analyzed with the use of categories useful in transnational research.

The aim of this book is to explain economic dualism in the history of modern Europe. The emergence of the manorial-serf economy in the Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary in the 16th and the 17th centuries was the result of a cumulative impact of various circumstantial factors. The weakness of cities in Central Europe disturbed the social balance - so characteristic for Western-European societies - between burghers and the nobility. The political dominance of the nobility hampered the development of cities and limited the influence of burghers, paving the way to the rise of serfdom and manorial farms. These processes were accompanied by increased demand for agricultural products in Western Europe