Abstract
Reviewed by: Felicia Roşu, Leiden University, The Netherlands
The Polish-Lithuanian partitions and their aftermath are probably the messiest, most controversial, most difficult to tackle period in the history of the Commonwealth. The spectacular collapse of one of Europe’s largest polities, which took place between 1772 and 1795 but was preceded and followed by decades of stagnation and difficulties, has long pressed historians to find reasons for what was generally seen as the colossal failure of the Commonwealth’s internal structures. The dominant answer – best illustrated in Anglophone scholarship by Jerzy Lukowski’s work – has been to blame the political culture of the country, often portrayed as a mixture of anarchism, obstinacy, selfishness and/or feudal backwardness. Missing the train of Enlightened centralization, the citizens of the Commonwealth preferred to devote their energy to defending their ‘ancient’ liberties and privileges and resisting any kind of change to the structure of their polity. This attitude has been judged by the supporters of the Enlightenment – both then and now – as self-destructive, short-sighted and obtuse. A new perspective on this matter has been long overdue, and this is precisely what Curtis G. Murphy has set out to do with his ambitious work on Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian towns between 1764 and 1867.
Murphy’s work is a breath of fresh air in at least four important ways. The first is related to the scope and depth of research. The book straddles the pre- and post-partitions decades, following the transformations experienced by more than 20 small-to-medium royal and private towns from three provinces (Lublin, Wolhynia and Podolia) as they went through several administrations (usually, historians use the partitions either as a stopping or as a starting point, missing the chance to explore the consequences of late-eighteenth century changes). Furthermore, the research is based on a combination of macro and micro approaches that reveal both the intentions of central reformers and the mindset of people on the ground.
Second, this book brings an invaluable wealth of detail on town life in this period. East Central European towns have traditionally been labelled as weak and insignificant (another sign of the region’s backwardness), but Murphy’s research reveals a civic vibrancy that squarely contradicts this image. Chapter 4, on private towns, is particularly fascinating as it brings to light a massively understudied category of urban establishments, often dismissed by historians as being at the mercy of their owners and thus irrelevant as loci of civic behaviour. Murphy shows this not to be the case: owners had to compete for urban settlers and therefore had to offer them significant individual freedoms and collective autonomy in order to maintain the attractiveness and economic viability of their towns.
Third, Murphy strongly and convincingly challenges ‘the continued hegemony of the Enlightenment narrative of progress’, pointing instead to ‘the costs of modernity’ (24) and the profoundly colonial nature of Enlightened reforms. By studying the reports of central governments as well as the records, petitions and protests of townspeople, Murphy shows that the centralizing efforts of Polish, Austrian, Russian and Napoleonic administrations were not as rational as they portrayed themselves to be. They often privileged frivolous aspects such as ‘beautification and hierarchy’ (57, 84), thereby not only failing to revive the towns but actually pushing them into further economic, cultural and social decline.
Lastly, the book substantiates an idea put forward by Andrzej S. Kamiński but so far insufficiently explored empirically, namely that the culture of civic republicanism – generally considered a trait of the political nation, the nobility – deeply permeated other layers of the Polish-Lithuanian society as well. Murphy argues that this culture was not ‘anachronistic and backward’ but simply centred on other values than those at the core of the Enlightenment: self-government and liberty instead of centralization and uniformization. The book contains countless examples of late-eighteenth-century Christian and Jewish burghers, who, thanks to the imperfect overlap of competing authorities that left them room for agency and autonomy, saw themselves as citizens, rather than subjects, regardless of their meagre political rights at the central level. A century later, after several rounds of reforms that gave them wider political rights but gradually subordinated them to the state, they were no longer acting as citizens, but as subjects with little say in their own affairs. From the civic republican perspective, their story thus becomes ‘a tale of antiprogress, a decline in political possibilities and self-government with little compensation or improvement’ (235).
Instead of accepting the narrative of the Enlightenment as a rational system of social and political improvement, Murphy refreshingly approaches it as a belief system instead – one that was especially liable to fail when grafted onto a world animated by radically different values, such as liberty and self-government. The Enlightened narrative may have eventually won the day, but that is no reason for silencing the voices of those who experienced, first-hand, the costs of modernity.