Peasant Economy in the Coal and Smelting Regions of Middle-East Europe before and during the Early Period of Industrialization

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the peasant economy and the coal and smelting industry in the mining-industrial regions of Central and Eastern Europe before and during the early period of industrialization. The aim is to trace, through a comparative three-phase model, how different types of industrial development affected the agrarian social structure and the social position of the peasantry in these regions.
The analysis draws on regional case studies from Silesia, the Dąbrowa Basin, the Ostrava-Karvina Basin, the Ruhr, and the Donbas, making use of statistical data on the territorial origin of the industrial workforce and archival evidence on labour obligations, land tenure, and peasant earnings.
The article identifies three phases of industrial-agrarian interaction. In the first phase, feudal mining and smelting industry rested on compulsory peasant labour in transport and production, hereditary industrial work obligations, and the erosion of peasant land rights. In the second phase, the transition to capitalist technology and the abolition of serfdom released peasants from compulsory labour; outside-agriculture earnings - from waggon driving, seasonal employment in mines and iron works, room rental, and quarrying - became central to the peasant household economy, while local food markets expanded with the growth of the industrial population. In the third phase, railway development in Central and Eastern Europe industrialization eliminated the need for peasant transport services, urbanization absorbed peasant land, and smallholdings lost their market function, retaining only a subsistence role.
The peasantry as a social class dissolved in the industrial core while surviving on the agricultural peripheries. The article concludes that the impact of industrialization on the peasant economy depended on the regional structure of mining and smelting development, the pace of railway expansion, and the pre-existing east-west differences in feudal and capitalist agrarian social structure.