The article explores the impact of inaccessible landscapes (such as forests, swamps, and wastelands) on the relationship between subjects and centers of power (such as the nobility and the state) in Eastern Europe during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This region’s situation was unique because successive disasters, including the Little Ice Age, eighty years of continuous warfare, epidemics, and economic collapse, resulted in significant depopulation and the re-wilding of vast areas of Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine in the early eighteenth century. The dominant historical narrative portrays this period in an unequivocally negative light. This text aims to present a more nuanced perspective. While the disasters at the turn of the eighteenth century affected all social classes, the weakening of the repressive apparatus due to the crisis, coupled with the growth of forests, floodplains, and wastelands, caused the eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to become a destination for mass migration, particularly from neighboring enlightened monarchies. For many people in Central and Eastern Europe, migrating to a country offering ample hiding places, easy access to the commons, and significant privileges for folk colonizers was more appealing than living under the often repressive systems introduced by modern states, such as compulsory conscription, high taxes, and the elimination of cultural or religious autonomy.
Michał Pospiszyl (Sun,) studied this question.