There is a striking consensus in the literature on South-Eastern Europe. It is commonly agreed that the region missed the first wave of globalization, which brought growth and prosperity to most of the world at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The Balkans, as this most backward European periphery is also called, failed to make, it is insisted, any significant progress in its social and economic modernization prior WW-II. What I see as the main problem of the current literature on the South-East Europe is its static and sketchy character. Its unspoken corollary is that modernization (not more that partial and phlegmatic indeed) could be achieved only within the frames of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes.

The aim of the proposed research is to cast new light on the moving internal borders of modernisation in the Bulgarian village. On the basis of a unique archival collection of 588 peasant account books, discovered by chance in the National Archive, it proposes an in-depth interdisciplinary investigation of the microeconomics of peasant farming in one of the most densely populated regions of peasant Europe, less than a decade before it was swept up in the maelstrom of collectivization and forced modernization. Peasant account books provide an extraordinarily detailed glimpse into the day to day activities of small peasant farmers in Bulgaria between 1935 and 1945. ‘Measuring' the growth potential of rural Bulgarian we may then speculate on the existing prospects of modernisation avoiding the extremes of the forced collectivisation.