XVI-XIX a. Lietuvos ūkio raida Europos kontekste lyginamosios istorinės sociologijos požiūriu

ENThe goal of the study was to analyze Lithuanian economic development in the 16th-19th centuries, in the European context through the prism of theories and discussions which have taken place and are still within sociological and political economy comparison studies. During the period under discussion, the Lithuanian economy had shared features and similarities with the Polish, Czech and Hungarian economies. These countries fostered an economic system which was primitive; the sectors of the economy did not produce goods with high added value. Agricultural goods and different metal ores dominated the export structure. Considering Lithuanian socio-economic development in the 16th-19th centuries (until 1861) through the lense of non-Marxist and (neo-)Marxist economic concepts, we discover its main feature: fluctuations in the basic production of petty commodity. In the 16th-18th centuries the Lithuanian economy was weakly engaged in the inter-state market (in the CWS sense), and features of capital accumulation unrepresentative of the corvėe folwark owners' behaviour point to the feudal nature of its economy. Even so, a structure for the export of surplus goods produced on the estates has been noted and speaks to the existence o f elements of peripheral capitalism. When Lithuania found itself part of the Russian Empire in 1795, and in the midst of feudal economic policies occurring on the semi-periphery of the CWS, the country's economy, because of political reasons and the lack of marine ports, was not oriented towards industry, but rather towards the production of raw materials for the centers of empire and the Western market, further strengthening the agrarian nature of the economy. The country's economic situation up till 1861 is described as "peripheral on the semi-periphery.".