Złote łany, ziemniaczane pola i zagony buraków. Roślinny krajobraz polskiej wsi w perspektywie historii gospodarczej

Abstract

The article discusses the role of plants in Poland’s economic development over the last 500 years. The author presents the role of five plants in the history of Poland’s development: cereals (wheat and rye), potatoes, sugar beet and rape. The specificity of the economic development of modern Europe has made Poland one of Europe’s granaries and an important exporter of cereals. This shaped the civilization of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and contributed to its fall due to institutional specificity. In the 19th century, potatoes played an important role in the population development of Polish lands, as they helped feed the rapidly growing population. The spread of sugar beet cultivation created the conditions for the development of modern sugar industry in the second half of the 19th century. It became one of the first modern branches of the food industry in Poland and contributed to the modernization of the village. Quite recently, oilseed rape was to become a plant that would bring back the times of agricultural sheikhs – no longer the nobility would trade in cereals on the European markets, but entrepreneurs producing a vegetable substitute for diesel oil.