As discussed in Chapter 11, a part of the peripheral regions, such as Finland, Ireland, the Baltic countries, Poland, and Hungary, began to undergo a Western-type transformation from the 1860s and 1870s on. The Mediterranean region and Russia began to do so in the 1890s (see Chapter 12). In the relatively homogeneous geographical region of the Balkan peninsula, and the connected easternmost and southernmost provinces of Austria-Hungary (such as Galicia, Bukovina, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Dalmatia), the first tentative steps of modernization were taken, if at all, in the early twentieth century, but were stopped by the Balkan wars. This region failed to industrialize.

Pre-modern agriculture – return to a grain economy

The Balkan region became part of the Ottoman Empire in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. The empire preserved an unchanging non-European land tenure system, without private property. The Balkan population became serfs of the autocratic, militarily organized Ottoman state. This perpetuated an entirely peasant society that was almost totally illiterate, lacked a local elite, and was bounded by the ancient village communities, the zadruga, or three-generation families. At times sixty to eighty members of these extended families lived under one roof and worked together. During its “golden age,” the Ottoman Empire made certain positive contributions to Balkan agricultural development. But during the long period of Ottoman decline, and especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the central government disintegrated and was replaced by local Ottoman warlords and unruly Janissary hordes, which tyrannized and looted the peninsula. The decentralized Ottoman state became a predatory Leviathan that provided nothing to, but systematically ravaged, its subjugated populace.