Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century PDF Download

Author: Gershon David Hundert
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520249941
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Annotation A history of Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the eighteenth century which argues that this largest Jewish community in the world at that time must be at the center of consideration of modernity in Jewish history.

Author: Richard Butterwick
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030025220X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
A major new assessment of the "vanished kingdom" of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth--one which recognizes its achievements before its destruction Richard Butterwick tells the compelling story of the last decades of one of Europe's largest and least understood polities: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Drawing on the latest research, Butterwick vividly portrays the turbulence the Commonwealth experienced. Far from seeing it as a failed state, he shows the ways in which it overcame the stranglehold of Russia and briefly regained its sovereignty, the crowning success of which took place on 3 May 1791--the passing of the first Constitution of modern Europe.

Author: Peter Paul Bajer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004210652
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 616

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In the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries a considerable number of Scots migrated to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Some sojourned there for some time, while others stayed permanently and exercised commercial business and crafts. The migration stopped in the eighteenth century, and the Scots who remained in Poland seem to have lost their ethnic identity. This book offers an examination and assessment of this migration: numbers of migrants; patterns of settlement; laws regulating Scottish presence in Poland-Lithuania; their commercial, academic, religious and military activities; their social advancement into the Polish nobility; their assimilation and then the eventual disappearance as a distinct ethnic group in Poland-Lithuania.

Author: Adam Teller
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804799873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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It has often been claimed that Jews have a penchant for capitalism and capitalist economic activity. With this book, Adam Teller challenges that assumption. Examining how Jews achieved their extraordinary success within the late feudal economy of the eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, he shows that economic success did not necessarily come through any innate entrepreneurial skills, but through identifying and exploiting economic niches in the pre-modern economy—in particular, the monopoly on the sale of grain alcohol. Jewish economic activity was a key factor in the development of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and it greatly enhanced the incomes, and thereby the social and political status, of the noble magnates, including the powerful Radziwiłł family. In turn, with the magnate's backing, Jews were able to leverage their own economic success into high status in estate society. Over time, relations within Jewish society began to change, putting less value on learning and pedigree and more on wealth and connections with the estate owners. This groundbreaking book exemplifies how the study of Jewish economic history can shed light on a crucial mechanism of Jewish social integration. In the Polish-Lithuanian setting, Jews were simultaneously a despised religious minority and key economic players, with a consequent standing that few could afford to ignore.

Author: Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000197085
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
This book makes a contribution to ongoing European research into the political discourse of the early modern era, analyzing the political discourse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795). The sources comprise the broadly understood political literature from the end of the sixteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century. The author has selected and analysed concepts and ideas that are particularly important for the noble political discourse, with the aim of understanding what these concepts meant for the participants in public debate, who used them, how they explained and described the world, how they allowed for the formulation of political postulates and ideals, whether their meaning changed over time, and if so, then to what extent and under what influences. The author’s research focuses not only on the understanding of the concepts that functioned in the period under study but also on their use as instruments in the political struggle. The book is addressed to readers from the academic milieu – students and researchers – but is likewise accessible to less prepared readers interested in the history of political language and concepts as well as the history of political thought.

Author: Lech Mr¢z
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 6155053510
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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This book is the most comprehensive account of the history of Roma-Gypsies on the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It leads the reader through the eventful past of a people on the margins of contemporary Europe. Using previously unpublished documents, Lech Mr¢z contributes to a new self-definition of Romani people in contemporary Europe. The author overturns present stereotypes and popular media images of the social status of Roma-Gypsies in Eastern Europe, especially of their relations with state authorities, showing how the position of Roma-Gypsies shifted gradually from respected, wealthy, and partly settled citizens of the early modern times, towards criminalized vagrants of the eighteenth century. Roma-Gypsy Presence in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth will reward those interested in the development of state policies towards ethnic minorities and their influence on popular imageries.

Author: Andrzej Chwalba
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000203999
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
This volume provides a fresh perspective of the history and legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as the often-disputed memory of it in contemporary Europe. The unions between the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania have fascinated many readers particularly because many solutions that have been implemented in the European Union have been adopted from its Central and Eastern European predecessor. The collection of essays presented in this volume are divided into three parts – the Beginnings of Poland-Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Legacy and Memory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – and represent a selection of the papers delivered at the Third Congress of International Researchers of Polish History which was held in Cracow on 11-14 October 2017. Through their application of different historiographical perspectives and schools of history they offer the reader a fresh take on the Commonwealth’s history and legacy, as well as the memory of it in the countries that are its inheritors, namely Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine. An exploration of one of the biggest countries in Early Modern Europe, this will be of interest to historians, political scientists, cultural anthropologists and other scholars of the history of Central and Eastern Europe in the Early Modern period.

Author: Robert I. Frost
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198208693
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
The history of eastern European is dominated by the story of the rise of the Russian empire, yet Russia only emerged as a major power after 1700. For 300 years the greatest power in Eastern Europe was the union between the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania, one of the longest-lasting political unions in European history. Yet because it ended in the late-eighteenth century in what are misleadingly termed the Partitions of Poland, it barely features in standard accounts of European history. The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union 1385-1569 tells the story of the formation of a consensual, decentralised, multinational, and religiously plural state built from below as much as above, that was founded by peaceful negotiation, not war and conquest. From its inception in 1385-6, a vision of political union was developed that proved attractive to Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, and Germans, a union which was extended to include Prussia in the 1450s and Livonia in the 1560s. Despite the often bitter disagreements over the nature of the union, these were nevertheless overcome by a republican vision of a union of peoples in one political community of citizens under an elected monarch. Robert Frost challenges interpretations of the union informed by the idea that the emergence of the sovereign nation state represents the essence of political modernity, and presents the Polish-Lithuanian union as a case study of a composite state. The modern history of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus cannot be understood without an understanding of the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian union. This volume is the first detailed study of the making of that union ever published in English.

Author: Jerzy Lukowski
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415032285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
In the closing years of the 18th century, the old Polish state paid the price of over 100 years of ungovernability in political extinction. Between 1772 and 1795 an area of Eastern Europe larger than France was divided among Russia, Prussia and Austria. At the very time that monarchial absolutism seemed to be collapsing in Western Europe, the dismemberment of the Polish "noble democracy" affirmed absolutism's triumph in the East. Bringing together Polish scholarship previously inaccessible to English-speaking readers, the author examines the economy, the society and the institutional structure of early modern Poland and analyzes her loss of national sovereignty in the light of Poland's lack of political centralization and dynastic strength. Not only does this book illuminate a much neglected area of European history, and assist those trying to make sense of Poland's heritage, it also provides much comparative material for students of early modern history in general. Furthermore no reader could fail to be struck by the parallels in the problematic relationship between Poland and Russia in the 18th century and today.

Author: Daniel Z. Stone
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295803622
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
For four centuries, the Polish�Lithuanian state encompassed a major geographic region comparable to present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Estonia, and Romania. Governed by a constitutional monarchy that offered the numerous nobility extensive civil and political rights, it enjoyed unusual domestic tranquility, for its military strength kept most enemies at bay until the mid-seventeenth century and the country generally avoided civil wars. Selling grain and timber to western Europe helped make it exceptionally wealthy for much of the period. The Polish�Lithuanian State, 1386�1795 is the first account in English devoted specifically to this important era. It takes a regional rather than a national approach, considering the internal development of the Ukrainian, Jewish, Lithuanian, and Prussian German nations that coexisted with the Poles in this multinational state. Presenting Jewish history also clarifies urban history, because Jews lived in the unincorporated "private cities" and suburbs, which historians have overlooked in favor of incorporated "royal cities." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the private cities and suburbs often thrived while the inner cities decayed. The book also traces the institutional development of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland�Lithuania, one of the few European states to escape bloody religious conflict during the Reformation and Counter Reformation. Both seasoned historians and general readers will appreciate the many excellent brief biographies that advance the narrative and illuminate the subject matter of this comprehensive and absorbing volume.