CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Dangstorp, Matthew Karsten |
|---|---|
| Title | Revolutionary Economies and War: A Diachronic Comparison of the Napoleonic Continental System and Soviet War Communism |
| Summary | The present thesis presents a diachronic comparison of the economic systems of Napoleonic France and the early Soviet Union; The Continental System and War Communism. Methodologically, the comparison is inspired by Charles Tilly’s Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, and Jürgen Kocka’s Comparative and Transnational History. The comparison has two principal objectives. First to question the uniqueness of the Soviet Union’s socialist experiment from a structural economic perspective by comparing with a historical antecedent with whom it shared certain similarities but marked ideological differences. Second, the comparison postulates the Continental System and War Communism as the approaches of two different societies to the same problem; a comparison of the last mercantilist challenge to capitalism with the first socialist one. Structurally, the paper will be divided into three chapters presenting three thematic components, roughly separated chronologically, and subjecting them to comparison. First the broad topic of economic theory and practice in the early 19th and early 20th centuries as well as its understanding by Napoleon and Lenin will be treated. Second, the Continental System and War Communism will be examined in their institutional frameworks. Third, the implantation, progression, and collapse of the systems will be compared. This investigation concludes the following. First, that despite their great ideological and temporal distance, the two projects shared a markedly similar logic and structural similarity. Second, despite both systems being formulated as desirable economic alternatives for the population at large to a demonized global capitalism, the systems’ primary means of enforcement was coercion. Third, despite their many flaws, neither system was inherently doomed, but were rather overthrown from without contingently. |
| Supervisor | Hennings, Jan |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/dangstorp_matthew.pdf |
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