The events of 1914 initiated the redrawing of many boundaries, both geopolitical and intellectual. At the outbreak of the war the London-based anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski was at a professional meeting in Australia. Technically an ‘enemy alien’ (a Pole of Austro-Hungarian citizenship), he was barred from returning to Britain; stranded in Australia, under surveillance by authorities and with insecure finances, Malinowski began fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands that would result in his groundbreaking Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922).1Argonauts’ influence rested on its compelling portrait of the anthropologist as ‘participant-observer’, the insider/outsider uniquely poised to decode and recode cultures and meanings.2 Malinowski thus adeptly retooled his own ambiguous status into a paradigm of the ethnographer’s optimal subject-position – quipping that he himself was particularly suited to this role, as ‘the Slavonic nature is more plastic and more naturally savage than that of Western Europeans’.3

While the Viennese origins of key neoliberal intellectuals is well known, the formative influence of the Habsburg Empire on their thought is surprisingly understudied. This article argues that the empire was a silent and open partner in the writings of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises on international order, especially on questions of migration and the management of a polyglot population. After 1918 Mises conceived of robust forms of multinational governance capable of protecting a world of what he called ‘perfect capitalism’ with total global mobility of labour, capital and commodities. Yet, by 1945 he had scaled back his proposals to the effective recreation of the Habsburg Empire. I show that Mises’s international theory was cleft by a faultline between a normative theory of an open borders world and the empirical reality of a closed borders world, underwritten by what he saw as the stubborn obstacles of human ignorance and racial animus.

This article examines contributions of the chief economic statistician and socialist activist Ludwik Landau (1902–1944) that empirically investigated Poland’s underdevelopment in the framework of world capitalist economy. Landau pioneered a structural approach to measure the global gap between rich and poor countries in 1938–9, when such a synthetic view was largely unimaginable. Landau’s main work in international comparative statistics, World Economy, scholarly elaborated his socialist views on the necessity of non-capitalist development for Poland and other poor regions in agrarian Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. I argue that the Polish experience bestowed epistemic advantage in understanding the non-industrialised world and became a starting point from which to explore underdevelopment globally. This article concludes with a discussion of the political and epistemic significance of Landau’s work and how it figures in the larger history of development and statistical measurement of the world.

The Durkheimian School of sociology was one of the most comprehensive programmes ever developed in the social sciences. This article contributes to those accounts of the School that discuss its intergenerational, interdisciplinary and international transformations after the Great War. From this perspective, the article presents the case of a Polish scholar, Stefan Czarnowski (1879–1937), whose early work on the cult of St. Patrick in Ireland became one of the Durkheimian classics on social integration. In the interwar period Czarnowski argued against race studies and anti-social concepts of culture and called for sociologically grounded comparative world history ordered around the notions of class and work. More generally, Czarnowski’s reconfiguration of Durkheimian universal principles in the specific location of East Central Europe calls for a deeper historicisation of the Durkheimian School as a movement in international social sciences.

This article explores how two of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski’s Polish protegés, Feliks Gross (1906–2006) and Józef Obrębski (1905–67), sought to rebuild careers in the United States after the Second World War. Reading the scholars’ correspondence of 1946 to 1948, exchanged while Gross was commuting between jobs in New York and Wyoming and Obrębski was conducting fieldwork in Jamaica, it examines the confidence, excitement and sense of discovery with which the two refugees sought to transplant theories and methods first cultivated in interwar Poland to new soil. Arguing that Gross and Obrębski approached exile as a chance to ‘go global’ with Polish social science, it emphasises the role of both place and displacement in intellectual history. In particular, it looks at how the scholars drew on pre-war experiences in East Central Europe to produce new ways of thinking about nationality, globalisation and decolonisation in the post-war world.

The interwar period was a time when the rural world gained new prominence in visions of modernity and modernisation across the world. The newly reconfigured countries of Eastern Europe played a key role in focusing attention on the countryside as an important area of state intervention. This coincided with a greater involvement of the social sciences in debates and in projects of development and modernisation, both nationally and internationally. This article examines the contribution of the Bucharest School of Sociology to the creation of an idea of ‘the global countryside’ that emerged in the interwar years and only matured in the post-war period.

A new and important model for international health originated in the 1920s as a rural health project in the Macedonian region of Yugoslavia. Thus, the involvement of international organisations in social stability and human security did not follow the Great Depression of the 1930s, as has been argued. In fact, the redefinition of the League of Nations’ mandate began with its Health Organisation in the 1920s, growing from local health projects. These initiatives adapted principles of social medicine to address the challenges of constructing egalitarian democratic states in the agrarian peripheries of post-imperial Europe.

This article seeks to write Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe into the history of post-Second World War global psychiatry and to explore the significance of Marxist psychiatry in an international context. It traces Yugoslav psychiatrists’ transnational and interdisciplinary engagements as they peaked in the 1960s. Focusing on the distinguished Belgrade psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Vladimir Jakovljevic (1925–68), it looks at Yugoslav psychiatry’s clinical and anthropological research in the global South to shed light on its contributions to Western-dominated transcultural psychiatry. Through this lens the article also explores how Eastern Europe’s intellectuals engaged with decolonisation and the notions of race, ‘primitivism’ and modernity. Jakovljevic’s involvement in transcultural psychiatry demonstrated the inherent contradiction of Eastern European Marxist psychiatry: its dubiously colonial ‘civilising mission’ towards the subalterns in its own populations and its progressive, emancipatory agenda. Jakovljevic’s writings about Africa ultimately turned into an unprecedented opportunity to shed light on some glaring internal inconsistencies from Yugoslavia’s own socio-political context.