Who Benefited from the Liberation of the Peasants?: Migration Activity of Peasants in Polish Lands and Its Beneficiaries

• In Event: Eastern European Emigrants and (Self-)Liberation: National Emancipation and Personal Freedom in Polish and Czechoslovak Discourses Abroad

Abstract

The turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was a time of growing peasant activity in Polish lands. Freed from serfdom, they had to find a place in an increasingly globalized, capitalist world. For many of them, the only salvation from the threat of hunger and freezing in the overpopulated, structurally backward countryside, the only chance to liberate themselves from tragic living conditions, was migration. So they migrated for seasonal work, e.g. from the Congress Kingdom or Galicia to Prussia, but also further, e.g. overseas: primarily to the United States and Brazil. In my presentation, I want to talk about their fate: about their most popular migration routes, about the success of peasants' attempts to settle in a new place, about the changes taking place in their identity. I also want to focus on all those who suddenly became interested in the fate of peasants when they entered the global labour market without anyone asking. Prussian Junkers; German, Polish and Ukrainian nationalists; Brazilian government; manufacturers and landowners in the Congress Kingdom - for all of them, for various reasons, peasant migrations and peasant autonomy turned out to be extremely important. For them, the activity of peasants striving to liberate themselves from an economically and socially subordinate position has become an excellent opportunity to pursue their own political and economic interests.

Author

• Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez, Institute of Slavic Studies, PAN (Poland)