Peter Gunst Summary

Peter Gunst focuses on why Eastern/Central Europe struggled to keep up with Western Europe technically, socially, and economically. The first peculiarity he notes is how there was no private ownership in Eastern Europe like there was in Western. Instead, the region used the idea of common land property. This isolated village communities and kept the region politically inferior to the well-connected Western Europe. These communal fields also created economic and social stasis because the system didn’t promote the intensification of production.
Eastern Europe also experienced extraordinarily strong systems of central power which prevailed over a dependent nobility. As Gunst notes, “the structure of Eastern European society was therefore not