Communist Albania is often portrayed as a backwater, paranoid state with an eccentric dictator, Enver Hoxha. Basically, it was a joke, signified by the 750,000 bunkers littering the country. Of course, everyday life in Albania didn’t fit the stereotypes. Like many communist regimes, the Albanian Communist Party carried out a massive modernization campaign, a process that turned small agricultural communities into sites of industrial production. This is the story of Artan Hoxha’s microhistory Sugarland. The transformation of swampy Maliq into a major hub of sugar production. How did sugar transform the people of Maliq? And how did modernization in Albania intersect with that of postwar Europe? The Eurasian Knot spoke to Artan Hoxha about the impact of sugar on ordinary rural Albanian lives. Guest: Artan Hoxha is a historian of Southeastern Europe with a strong thematic interest in social and cultural transformations during the 20th century. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently a researcher at the Institute of History in Tirana, Albania. He’s the author of Sugarland: The Transformation of the Countryside in Communist Albania published by Central European University Press.