Sugarland
The transformation of the countryside in communist Albania
Can we write the history of the 20th century by focusing on one single place? In his latest book Sugarland: the transformation of the countryside in Communist Albania, Artan R. Hoxha embraces this challenge. The place he chooses is Maliq: an ex-swamp land in southeastern Albania, which the Albanian Communist regime transformed into the country’s center of sugar production. By zooming in and zooming out, Hoxha explores the economic, environmental, social, and cultural transformations that did take place in Maliq and links them to broader European and global historical trends that transcend both the East-West divide and the pre-and Communist eras. Last but not least, Hoxha attempts to de-exoticize Albania’s history, especially that of Communism, generally identified exclusively with paranoia, extreme ideological dogmatism, and xenophobia.
By integrating in this study environmental, economic, and anthropological approaches, Artan R. Hoxha, uses microhistory as a scholarly tool for understanding the social and cultural transformations that Albania has undergone during the 20th century.
Artan Hoxha Ph.D. is a historian of Southeastern Europe with a strong thematic interest in the social and cultural transformations during the 20th century. He holds a doctorate degree from the University of Pittsburgh and currently is a researcher at the Institute of History in Tirana, Albania. He is the author of Communism, Atheism, and the Orthodox Church of Albania: Cooperation, Survival, and Suppression, 1945–1967 (Routledge, 2022) and Sugarland: The Transformation of the Albanian Countryside in Communist Albania (CEU Press, 2023).