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The article describes the tradition of studying Moravian cities in native Slavonic studies and concludes the necessity of further researching this issue.

The article describes the tradition of studying Moravian cities in native Slavonic studies and concludes the necessity of further researching this issue.

In February 1990 a major conference dedicated to the recent history of the East of Europe was organised at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. The revised papers, edited by Joseph Held, comprise The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. It is the first major Western-language compendium discussing a broad region of Europe which brings together the talents of prominent specialists and exhibits thorough familiarity with the latest scholarship. Such an undertaking was predestined to yield a volume of significance. The kaleidoscopic developments over the last few years make this work extraordinarily timely and important beyond its obvious scholarly merits.

The Old Regime and the Enlightenment -- The French Revolution and Napoleon -- The Industrial Revolution and the birth of capitalism -- 1848: The peoples' spring -- Marx, Marxism, and socialism -- Darwinism and social Darwinism -- The unifications of Italy and Germany -- The Age of Imperialism and the scramble for Africa -- World War I -- The Russian Revolution and Communism -- World War II and the Holocaust -- Europe divided, the Cold War, and decolonization -- 1989: The collapse of Communism and end of the Cold War -- The European Union: Europe united and free?

Abstract: "Islam, Merchants, and Capitalism" draws attention to the missing link between early and central medieval Islamic socioeconomic history (ca. 650–1250) and the history of capitalism. This intertext essay starts from reassessing the work of French Marxist Islamicist Maxime Rodinson, who first made a programmatic attempt to forge such a link in his seminal 1966 Islam and Capitalism . It then proceeds to lay bare the reasons why Rodinson's call went largely unheard in the following decades, identifying the persistence of a pervasive decline paradigm within medieval Islamic socioeconomic history as the key obstacle preventing advances in the field and foreclosing avenues for theoretical discussion. Regrettably this paradigm, while outdated and no longer tenable, still remains authoritative and is frequently invoked by modern theorists of "underdevelopment." The essay then discusses some examples of recent groundbreaking scholarship that deploy new archaeological and documentary sources to decidedly move away from decline, showing the way forward out of this historiographical impasse. Finally, the essay returns to the question of capitalism, and of the forms in which this ambiguous term can, or cannot, be applied to early and central medieval Islamic societies, calling for a recentering of the Islamic Middle Ages in a longue-durée global history of capitalism.