Introduction

The year 2029 will mark the centenary of the beginning of the greatest economic crisis known to the modern world—the Great Depression. Strikingly, while we know much about its impact on the United States and parts of Europe, its effect on the much larger rest of the world is almost unknown. “The Great Depression dealt a harsh blow to the leading powers of the world,” Iván T. Berend wrote in his landmark study Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe Before World War II: “Small wonder that the relatively poor countries at the periphery of the European and world economy suffered even more.” ¹ Our book puts the focus on this periphery: Eastern Europe. Although Eastern Europe was more heavily affected by the economic crisis of the 1930s than most other parts of the continent, the history of the Great Depression has remained largely unwritten for this region. Neither regional nor transnational or comparative studies exist that reconstruct the crisis and assess its impact on politics, societies, and economies. ² We intend this book to fill this gap and, in addition, make a significant contribution to the broader scholarship on the economic turmoil that shattered the interwar order and paved the path toward World War II. We would like to thank the Gerda-Henkel Foundation for making the editing of this volume possible as part of their generous funding commitment to the project The Liminality of Failing Democracy: East Central Europe during the Interwar Slump.