History of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

Early modern Poland-Lithuania was once almost terra incognita in Anglophone historiography. However, since the 1980s many important monographs, journal articles and collective volumes have been published by historians whose working language is English. An increasing amount of work originally written in Polish (and occasionally in other languages of the successor nations of the old Commonwealth) has also appeared in English translation. The quality of such translations has improved substantially. Yet although substantial bibliographies of Polish-Lithuanian history in English can now be compiled, the coverage remains patchy. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fare much better than earlier ones. The pages devoted to political ideas far outweigh those on economic developments. Urban history now does better than rural history. Some groups in the Commonwealth’s diverse society, notably Jews and Ukrainian Cossacks, have attracted much more attention than others. With the exception of Daniel Stone’s The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795 (2001), which briskly covers its extended period in 374 pages, no general history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth has yet been published (although there are two contrasting histories of the eighteenth century, by Jerzy Lukowski and Józef Andrzej Gierowski respectively, and the second volume of Robert Frost’s Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania, covering the period after 1569, is eagerly awaited). So the book now under review will shed light on many subjects hitherto inaccessible to those reliant on work published in English (or in German and French as well)

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