The massive inflow of foreign capital and its role in creating modern banking and transportation systems spearheaded the modern transformation in the peripheries. The prospect of unlimited Western markets enabled the peripheral countries to sell huge quantities of agricultural products and food. The need to increase agricultural output to meet Western demand stimulated their modernization. Parts of the peripheries, from Russian-occupied Finland, the Baltic region, and Poland, to the Hungarian half of the Habsburg Empire, the eastern provinces of Prussia (later United Germany), and British-ruled Ireland, underwent a relatively successful agricultural revolution. Although half a century late, modernization in these areas was quite impressive. Their agricultural modernization took off from the middle of the nineteenth century.

These areas enjoyed the geopolitical advantage of being located next to the rapidly industrializing West and being part of huge imperial markets. At the same time, they had relatively higher cultural-educational standards than had other peripheral regions. Finland and some of the Baltic region had at one point belonged to Sweden and had thus preserved some elements of the Scandinavian social-legal institutional systems. In some of these regions, large minority populations, such as German landowners and businessmen and Jewish intermediaries, represented a strong business orientation that compensated somewhat for the traditional anti-business prejudices of the local nobility and peasantry. The minorities were highly concentrated in the urban centers, and they facilitated the region's urbanization to a certain extent. Protestantism also gained ground in relatively large parts of these areas, unlike in most of the peripheries. Protestantism influenced business culture and popular behavior in Finland, parts of the Baltic region, and a part of Hungary. Educational levels rose significantly, generally in between the Western and Eastern or Southern standards. For historical reasons, a number of modern institutions had emerged in these areas in early modern times, in contrast to other peripheries.