The article takes the beginnings of potato cultivation and consumption in Eastern Europe as a case study in Enlightenment socioeconomic history. Reading narrative and economic sources from the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth against the broader regional and European context, it retraces a trajectory whereby the tubers spread bottom-up via foreign immigrants to local peasantry and thereafter to nobility. That the new beneficial crop proliferated in Poland-Lithuania without state or elite official promotion, while Austrian authorities only partly succeeded in introducing potatoes in Habsburg eastern provinces, demonstrates that state-led modernization could only be effective in coincidence with local needs.
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