Rethinking Rural Labor: Eastern Europe, International Experts, and the Interwar Roots of Development Economics

In the mid 1930s, agrarian labor became a new focus of international politics and economic expertise. After the Great Depression, peasants came to epitomize the most neglected and economically disadvantaged, and yet one of the most critical, objects of global security. One response to that predicament was the formation of a new social scientific language, which aimed to account for the relationship between migration, labor and political economy in the non-Western world. The emergence of this expert knowledge, I claim, had its roots in collaboration between Eastern European social scientists, who had studied the ‘agrarian labor question’ since the late nineteenth century, and international policy-makers in Geneva and London.

In particular, this paper traces the international trajectory of the concept of “rural hidden unemployment,” which was designed to revolutionize prevailing ways of thinking about “surplus labor.” My starting point is late nineteenth-century Eastern and Central Europe, where the relationship between migration and agrarian labor became an object of scholarly interest and political contestation. In the 1930s, Polish Marxists developed the idea of “peasant unemployment,” which reconfigured dominant Neomalthusian discourses to consider structural capitalism and underinvestment. Eventually these Eastern European studies on agrarian labor attracted attention in the International Labour Office and the League of Nations. In the late 1930s, the International Labour Office attempted to apply this Eastern European form of expertise to the non-Western world.

The Eastern European involvement in the making of this conception of global agrarian labor can shed a new light on epistemologies of rural welfare that preceded and then led to the birth of “development economics.” This move, I argue, can offer a new chronology and political geography of twentieth-century development thinking.