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Marian Małowist Seminar

prof Marian MałowistAbout the seminar…Schedule

fot. zbiory rodzinne

Małowist Marian, born 19 December 1909 in Łódź, died 30 August 1988 in Warsaw – one of the most eminent Polish historians of the 20th century.

Timeline

  • 19 XII 1909 – Born in Łódź
  • 1947 – published the work Kaffa – a Genoese colony in the Crimea….
  • 1949 – became a professor at the University of Warsaw
  • 1954 – Studies in the History of Crafts during the Crisis of Feudalism….
  • 1958 – founded the periodical Acta Polonia Historica (editor-in-chief until 1973)
  • 1964 – The Great States of the Western Sudan in the late Middle Ages
  • 1969 – Europe and West Africa in the Era of Early Colonial Expansion
  • 1985 – published the work Tamerlan and his times
  • 1987 – co-published the work Slavery with his wife, Izabella
  • 30 VIII 1988 – died in Warsaw

Biography

Marian Małowist was born in Łódź on 19 December, 1909, to a secular Jewish family.

His father was Jakub Małowist, a doctor at the Kasa Chorych (Health Insurance Fund), who was also active among the poorest strata of the Łódź proletariat; his mother, Rozalia (née Landau), came from a well-known bourgeois family of intellectuals with a strong respect for academic knowledge and education.

The dilemmas of youth – ideology or science

Afflicted with polio as a child, Marian Małowist later showed wide-ranging interests in the humanities (mainly history and literature) and displayed incredible diligence, starting from his early years at Łódź schools. While also sensitive to social issues, he joined the Union of Communist Youth in 1925, and was politically active among the Łódź working-class youth. In 1927, he began studying history at the University of Warsaw. After moving to Warsaw, he began to distance himself more and more from political activities, remaining only a sympathiser of the left-wing movement and a supporting member of the MOPR. In the 1930s, Małowist became increasingly critical of Stalin’s oppressive policies in the Soviet Union.

The most important reason for his withdrawal from active political activity, however, was his full devotion to historical research. Years later, Małowist stated outright that it was a pity to waste precious time on things that distracted him from his studies. During his time at the University of Warsaw, he was greatly influenced by the sociologist Professor S. Czarnowski, and the eminent historian and founder of the Institute of History at the University of Warsaw, Professor M. Handelsman, who was the supervisor of his MA thesis on the relationship between Hanseatic cities and medieval Flanders (1930), and then of his doctoral dissertation (defended in 1934) on Foreign trade in Stockholm and Swedish external policy, in the years 1470-1503.

The difficult pre-war years and the tragedy of war

In spite of his outstanding achievements and exceptional academic talent, Małowist’s chances for a university career were thwarted by anti-Semitism, which had been growing both in the Sanation (Sanacja) political movement and among young academics since the mid-1930s. Until the outbreak of the Second World War, Marian Małowist worked as a history teacher in Warsaw secondary schools. At the same time, he was writing his habilitation thesis: Kaffa – a Genoese colony in the Crimea and the Eastern Problem in 1453-1475 (written before 1939, published in 1947). From the beginning of the occupation, he taught classes in secret. Starting in the autumn of 1941, he and his wife, Maria Frydland, a psychologist, found themselves in the Warsaw ghetto, where he continued his clandestine teaching activities. After his wife was deported to a death camp, he managed to escape from the ghetto to the Aryan side, where he received support from members of the Home Army – above all, from his personal friend, the distinguished historian S. Herbst. It was at Herbst’s instigation that he decided to move to the countryside, where he taught secret classes at the middle school level, remaining in close contact with the local command of the Peasant Battalions.

After Soviet troops entered Poland in 1944, he reached Lublin, where he temporarily found employment at a Polish Radio station. After being hit by a military vehicle and suffering severe injury and permanent disability, he went to Sweden for several months of treatment thanks to the support of his relatives in Stockholm. Despite his ill health, he also used this stay for scientific research.

Founder of the school of economic history of the Middle Ages

Against the insistence by his Swedish family that he remain in the West, Małowist soon returned to Warsaw. He married the eminent historian of antiquity, Izabella Bieżuńska. He soon resumed his academic activities at the Institute of History at the University of Warsaw, receiving his professorship in 1949. Starting in 1951, he was also a member of TNW, and from 1958, the editor-in-chief of the journal Acta Polonia Historica, which he founded and which was published by the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, making the findings of research by Polish historians available in foreign languages. His unparalleled pedagogical talent attracted many students to his seminars. His students included, among others: M. Bogucka, B. Geremek, J. Kieniewicz, M. Kula, A. Mączak, H. Samsonowicz, M. Tymowski, A. Wyrobisz, and B. Zientara. Even after his retirement in 1980, he conducted a master’s seminar until his death (on 30th August 1988), giving his students lessons about history as well as patriotism, by sharing his experiences and memories of the pre-war and wartime periods. Despite his leftist sympathies and the inspiration he drew from Marxist concepts, he never joined the PZPR (Communist Party in Poland) and remained critical of the abuses of power in the People’s Republic of Poland. His knowledge of more than a dozen foreign languages allowed him to navigate world historiography freely and to change research topics frequently, as well as build the international impact of his research and publications and his personal friendships, including with F. Braudel. He was heavily influenced by the concepts of economic history developed by I. Wallerstein. In the 1970s, he lectured as a visiting professor in the USA.

Scientific concepts

Marian Małowist’s research interests focused mainly on the general economic history of medieval Europe, Asia, and Africa, although he often touched on issues related to the early modern era. After the Second World War, Małowist turned his attention to the problems of economic change in Western Europe, Poland, and the entire Baltic region in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, focusing on issues of the development of agriculture, crafts, and trade (Studia z dziejów rzemiosła w okresie kryzysu feudalizmu w zachodniej Europie w XIV i XV wieku, 1954; Wschód a Zachód Europy w XIII-XVI wieku. Confrontations of Socio-Economic Structures, 1973). In his works, he searched for the causes of the backwardness of Central and Eastern Europe in relation to the West. The essence of his view on history and the school he created was a comparative understanding of the history of different countries and regions. The question of the interdependence of systems at unequal or quite different levels of development led him to undertake pioneering Polish research into the economic and state development of African countries, which was also echoed in Western European historiography (The Great States of Western Sudan in the Late Middle Ages, 1964; Europe and Western Africa in the Era of Early Colonial Expansion, 1969). At the end of his life, he published the biography Tamerlan and His Times (1985) and a work on forms of slavery in the Middle Ages and modern times (Slavery, 1987, co-authored with his wife, Izabella). A collection of his articles, Europe and its expansion, 14th-17th centuries (1993) was published posthumously. Bibliography of M. Malowist’s works may be found in Society-economy-culture. Studies dedicated to Marian Małowist… (1974) and in Przegląd Historyczny (1989, 4).

In 2020, a group of staff members from the Faculty of History established the Global History Team under the direction of Professor Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, which is being transformed into the Warsaw Center for Global History, in connection with our participation in the Excellence Initiative – Research University (IDUB) Programme. Among other things, the Center has the task of integrating the activities of the community of Polish historians who represent global perspectives, with foreign research centres.

One of our most important activities is the organisation of a continual seminar, which brings together historians and anthropologists concerned mainly with the non-European world, but also with Poland and Europe in a global context. The seminar will be held in English. We intend to invite eminent scholars of established international standing, but also promising young researchers from within our circle to give papers.

By making Marian Małowist the patron of our seminar, we would like to refer to the local traditions of the research perspective that interests us. Professor Małowist was undoubtedly a pioneer of research in the field of global history, even if that term was not being used in his time. While he was associated for much of his life with the University of Warsaw, he educated many esteemed historians, including our own masters. We would like for the “Marian Małowist Global History Seminar” to help perpetuate the memory of the Professor, among the younger generation of researchers.

Winter semester 2023/2024

  • 19 October: Alessandro Stanziani (L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales) “Eurocentrism: what is it? A longue durée approach”
  • 23 November: Jochen Lingelbach (University of Bayreuth) “On the Edges of Whiteness: Polish Refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War”
  • 14 December: Piotr Puchalski (Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny w Krakowie) “Colonial Connections, Postcolonial Insecurities: Poles in British Colonies after 1941”
  • 14 March: Alanna O’Malley (Leiden University), tbd
  • 23 May: Etienne Benson (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), tbd

Winter semester 2022/2023

The seminar takes place on Tuesdays, from 5.00-7.00 pm
at the Faculty of History, 26/28 Krakowskie Przedmieście Street, room 125.

Remote participation: https://meet.google.com/yek-zcfy-ggx

https://meet.google.com/yek-zcfy-ggx

  • 18 October: Jie-Hyum Lim (University of Warsaw/ Sogang University) ‘Victimhood Nationalism: A Global History’
  • 15 November: Florian Mühlfried (Ilia State University), ‘From Soviet to Capitalist Syncretism: the Transformation of a Sacred Site in Highland Georgia’
  • 6 December: Jorge Flores (University of Lisbon), ‘Global Approaches to Visual Political Dissent in the Early Modern Period’
  • 17 January: Henning Sievert (University of Heidelberg), ‘Medina and the Red Sea from the Perspective of the Local Ottoman Governor in the 18th Century’
  • 7 February: Stephen A. Smith (University of Oxford), ‘Folk Religion in China under Mao Zedong’

 

Summer semester 2022/2023

  • 8 March: Georgi Derluguian (New York University Abu Dhabi), ‘Russia and Poland: A Study in Historical Divergence’
  • 25 April: Mikko Toivanen (University of Warsaw), ‘An invitation to a party? Creating a colonial public and managing urban space in nineteenth-century Batavia’
  • 9 May: Corey Ross (University of Birmingham), ‘The Plumbing of Empire: Sanitary Systems, Adaptation, and Opposition in Global Perspective’
  • 30 May: Błażej Brzostek (University of Warsaw), ‘A peripheral factory in the global context: the case of wristwatch production in Blonie, Poland, 1959-1969’
  • 20 June: Jochen Lingelbach (University of Bayreuth), ‘On the Edges of Whiteness: Polish Refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War’