The disproportionate role of scholars from Central/Eastern/Southeastern Europe in social scientific innovation in the first half of the 20th century has been often noted but little explained. However, a growing body of works takes the geography of knowledge seriously and looks at post-Versailles Eastern Europe as a space and time of transforming histories of “elsewhere” into knowledge about “everywhere.” Precisely because we still know too little about the richness and the full scope of the history of social science on a global scale, this talk questions a center-periphery framework, which has often been used to explain and analyze the origins and spread of social and economic science. As Carol Gluck reminds us, in the modern age, the histories of “elsewhere” appeared “everywhere,” and the twentieth-century history of modernity can be narrated from any place in the world. Instead, this talk advances an anti-diffusionist argument to present a history of Polish interwar economists–Michał Kalecki and Ludwik Landau–who did not just try to emulate or appropriate European culture and science but contributed to it on equal terms. Kalecki’s theory of business cycles (1933) preceded John M. Keynes’s General Theory (1936), while Ludwik Landau’s World Economy, the groundbreaking yet completely forgotten estimation of global inequalities in 1938, shortly anticipated a similar work by Colin Clark, Keynes’s collaborator. This talk attempts to answer why they were not random ‘coincidences’ of science, but simultaneous innovations that cannot be explained solely through the history of knowledge transfer. It contributes to new history writing about social science that conceives of Polish and Eastern Europe as a key “locality” for thinking about the modern world.

Caption: Demographic growth and migrations from the countryside (in Polish wieś) and the city (miasto) in Poland (1922-1931) in: [Ludwik Landau] Young People on the Job Market (Warsaw, 1938), Table 23, graphic design by Leszek Piątkowski and Czesław Wielhorski.