ABSTRACT
From the perspective of what would later be called the Third World, Rumanian intellectual history before the First World War offers precocious critiques of an economy and society in which liberalism was the dominant ideology, though one extensively adapted to local circumstances and interests. Protectionist, Marxist and Populist schools were ably represented. Their target was (economic) liberalism, that corpus of ideology, theory and policy prescription which sought to free economic activity from all constraints on the market, and to promote the international division of labour through the alleged complementarity of parts of the world economy. Its reception and application in the Balkans largely had to await the independence of the states emerging from the Ottoman Empire in Europe which, in the Rumanian case, was achieved in rising degrees of formal autonomy between 1859 and 1877.
