• Complain

Curtis G. Murphy - From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus

Here you can read online Curtis G. Murphy - From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: Pittsburgh, year: 2018, publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, genre: History. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Curtis G. Murphy From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus
  • Book:
    From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    University of Pittsburgh Press
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2018
  • City:
    Pittsburgh
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

From Citizens to Subjects challenges the common assertion in historiography that Enlightenment-era centralization and rationalization brought progress and prosperity to all European states, arguing instead that centralization failed to improve the socioeconomic position of urban residents in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth over a hundred-year period.
Murphy examines the government of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the several imperial administrations that replaced it after the Partitions, comparing and contrasting their relationships with local citizenry, minority communities, and nobles who enjoyed considerable autonomy in their management of the cities of present-day Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. He shows how the failure of Enlightenment-era reform was a direct result of the inherent defects in the reformers visions, rather than from sabotage by shortsighted local residents. Reform in Poland-Lithuania effectively destroyed the existing system of complexities and imprecisions that had allowed certain towns to flourish, while also fostering a culture of self-government and civic republicanism among city citizens of all ranks and religions. By the mid-nineteenth century, the increasingly immobile post-Enlightenment state had transformed activist citizens into largely powerless subjects without conferring the promised material and economic benefits of centralization.

Curtis G. Murphy: author's other books


Who wrote From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies Jonathan Harris Editor - photo 1

Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies

Jonathan Harris, Editor

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright 2018, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6462-9

Cover art: Bernardo Bellotto (Canaletto), Krasiski Square with the Palace of the Republic, 1778
Cover design: Alex Wolfe

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8604-1 (electronic)

For Amanda, with love and gratitude

Preface LONG AGO IN A high school European history class in rural Tennessee - photo 2

Preface LONG AGO IN A high school European history class in rural Tennessee - photo 3

Preface LONG AGO IN A high school European history class in rural Tennessee - photo 4

Preface

LONG AGO, IN A high school European history class in rural Tennessee, I learned that there was once a country called Poland where, because of an inconvenient voting system known as the liberum veto, nothing could be accomplished. For this reason, the states neighboring this misguided land decided to divide the territory among themselves. We never heard about this country or its people again until the subject turned to the Second World War and the Holocaust. Later, in graduate school, I discovered that this Poland was in fact the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a complex, multi-ethnic, and confessionally pluralistic polity whose peoples came under the rule of empires professing to embody progress and civilization. I came to appreciate that the broad self-governing traditions and multi-religious coexistence of the Commonwealth had much more in common with contemporary liberal-democratic rhetoric in the United States and the European Union than did the rationalistic and colonial policies of the empires that subsequently carved up this country. The fact that most Anglophone historians, even experts on what was once called Eastern Europe, have labeled the former backward and the latter progressive seemed a great injusticeas well as a lost opportunity to understand the whole picture of central and eastern Europe. Inspired by this conviction, I decided more than ten years ago to devote my graduate study to this region and to undertake the present project.

Since these initial impressions, I have become aware that many people have indeed written about the Commonwealth in English, though often indirectly in the realm of Jewish or Ukrainian studies. Moreover, a great deal of new work on the Commonwealth and its peoples has appeared in the last decade, some written by people who have become my friends and colleagues in the field; and congresses specifically devoted to Poland-Lithuania now take place with some regularity, attracting scholars not only from Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia but also from Britain, Germany, the United States, and Japan. The collapse of Communism and the expansion of the European Union have offered new opportunities to reexamine nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives about progress and backwardness in Polish, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian historiography and have provided new perspectives to a generation of Anglophone historians for whom the division of Europe into western and eastern halves no longer forms the most salient fact of political geography.

Despite these promising developments, the territories of the former Commonwealth, like east central Europe as a whole, remain subject to orientalizing (and even auto-orientalizing) tropes and uninformed dismissals, particularly at the level of popular discourse. The tendency to conflate modern nation-states with premodern, multi-ethnic societies continues to fuel discussions about Polands history of anarchy and feudal oppression and to encourage Poles to claim the Commonwealths legacy of tolerance and participatory government as their own. At the same time, commentators unaware of premodern history frequently cite the regions lack of democratic traditions to explain contemporary political events. It is my conviction that European history in general requires a greater understanding of the territories of the former Commonwealth, not simply to correct erroneous stereotypes (often produced by imperial powers to justify their conquests) but also to reintroduce lapsed visions of liberty, self-government, and the political good. Once the rationalized unitary nation-state emerged as the only conceivable political model, alternative views of social and political organization fellinto obscurity. Nineteenth-century historians developed narratives in praise of the state-builders, wherein those monarchs like Louis XIV and Frederick the Great, who squeezed their populations in order to build palaces and wage more lethal wars, became agents of a progress, and this progress appeared to have arrived without any opportunity cost. Meanwhile, those peoples who checked regal ambitions (with the exception of the English) appeared backward and shortsighted. By overvaluing the rhetoric and perspective of the future great powers, whose dominance of Europe in prior periods was hardly foreordained, historians have omitted visions that are key to the larger picture of political change in Europe, and these neglected views may well serve as fruitful resources for contemporary political discussions. I hope that the present book may serve as a modest contribution to a larger corrective, which the history of east central Europe urgently requires.

This book would never have been conceived, must less written, without the advice, support, and constructive criticism of my dissertation advisor, Andrzej S. Kamiski, who first opened my eyeswith the help of certain voices from the past, including Jan Pasek and Bazyli Rudomiczto the fascinating and multinational world of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its many peoples. As any one of his former students would attest, Andrzej has been an extraordinary advisor and friend, supportive but (like a good guild master) unwilling to accept any trace of intellectual laziness or shoddy craftsmanship. He has been an untiring advocate for this project since its inception in 2007, the result of casual conversation over excellent wine about citizenship and the Enlightenment. Although the book has taken its own twists and turns along the way, Andrzej has never ceased to render advice, support, and criticism even after I completed my dissertation and began to pursue my career. What follows are my own ideas, as developed through an encounter with the sources and the relevant literatures, as well as conversations with many specialists in the field, but if someone should observe that I am a product of the Kamiski School, then I will consider this label a compliment of the highest order.

The research for this project took over two years, and led me to archives in Warsaw, Lublin, Krakw, and Kyiv, and I relied on several generous grants for support. The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship provided funds for a year of research inPoland and Ukraine, while azarski University, which was then the home of the Institute for Civic Space and Public Policy, funded eight months of research in Warsaw. I also received funding from the Georgetown History Department, where I obtained my PhD, in the form of travel grants to conduct research and non-service fellowships for completing the writing of the initial dissertation. In 2015, the Polish History Museum provided funds for a summer research trip to Warsaw in order to collect materials that I had been unable to obtain for my dissertation. Finally, a Social Policy Grant from Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, my new academic home, has enabled me to cover part of the costs involved in the production of this book.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus»

Look at similar books to From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus»

Discussion, reviews of the book From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.