Rural Cooperatives in “Semi-Peripheral” Europe (1850–1950)

The international scientific workshop Rural Cooperatives in “Semi-Peripheral” Europe (1850–1950) will be held on 16–18 October 2024 in the Cooperative Association of the Czech Republic (Těšnov 5, Praha 1). The workshop will be held in English. The workshop is being organized by the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), and by the Cooperative Association of the Czech Republic. The workshop is being financially supported by the Johann Gottfried Herder-Forschungsrat.

Programme

According to contemporary estimates, approximately one-third of Eastern Europeans were members of cooperatives around the mid-1920s. The rise of the cooperatives (cooperative associations) since the middle of the 19th century resulted from the fact that they helped the “common people“ during the economic transformation of the 19th and early 20th centuries to solve their everyday problems, e.g. by providing cheap loans and high-quality goods or by supporting them in the processing and marketing of agricultural goods. Their democratic nature and preserving the independence of individual economies (household or company) with the simultaneous creation of large-scale business structures increased their attractiveness. They formed the basis for their economic competitiveness. In agrarianist and Christian-social models of society which were conceptualized between the 1890ies and the 1930ies, the cooperatives became one of the most important institutions of rural modernization and in several cases the main approach in the search for a “third way” between capitalism and socialism in the rural society.