(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the eighteenth century

The duchy of Warsaw, 1800-15

Partitioned Poland, 1815-1914

Rebirth of the Polish state, 1918-23

Inter-war Poland: a land of many nationalities and faiths

Poland during the Second World War, 1939-44

Poland’s ‘move to the west’, 194 5

Poland and its ‘new’ neighbours, 1989-2005

Poland’s European Union Referendum, 2003

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

We are delighted to be able to bring out a second edition relatively soon after the original and are grateful to Cambridge University Press for allowing us both to expand the text and to add further illustrative materials. Most of the expansion has gone into the pre-1795 section of the book. A number of reviewers felt, rightly, that there was too dense an accumulation of materials (though some also appear to have failed to appreciate this belongs to a series of ‘Concise Histories’) and we trust that our additions will help readers come to grips more comfortably with what was one of the most complex states of Europe. The present day adds its own complexities and we have tried to take these on board at least to the extent of showing readers the challenges and problems that face today’s republic and member of the European Union.

Our thanks to Steven Rowell for his generous insights into the history of the medieval and early modern Lithuanian state, and to Michael Laird for his very useful comments on chapters 6-8. Isabelle Dambricourt at Cambridge University Press has been a model of editorial tact and assistance.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

Writing Concise Histories is an activity more rewarding than satisfactory. The begetters know how much has been omitted; readers, no matter how much or how little they know, have to put up with those omissions. This present offering in the Cambridge Concise Histories series is no exception. It is, however, the first to have been written by two authors, one an eighteenth-century specialist, the other more at home in the nineteenth century. Neither of us felt quite up to the undertaking of an all-embracing treatment of Poland’s entire past; if some of the difficulties which such an undertaking might have created become apparent to our readers, then we will have achieved something.

For there have been at least two 'Polands’. One disappeared from the political map of Hurope in 1795. For over one hundred and twenty years afterwards, it either did not exist, or did so in the form of spluttering, half-formed entities, which had a kind of relationship with what had gone before, but a relationship so uncertain, be it at a wider political level or be it at that of the individual ‘Pole’, that it is almost impossible to define it in any satisfying detail. The state that emerged in the aftermath of the First World War was very different indeed from the one which met its end in the late eighteenth century; these differences are even more striking in the state which appeared after the Second World War, following an excision from the political map more brutal than anything the country had endured before.

The links between the two 'Polands’, the one pre-1795, the other post-1918, remain indissoluble. Poles have always had to rebuild their past, not least because of the systematic attempts to deprive them of it. The most tangible sign of that of course is Warsaw itself: the so-called Old and New Towns are bijou replicas not just of structures destroyed by the Germans during the Second World War but of buildings going back to the old, pre-1795 state and to the Middle Ages. And similar extensive reconstruction has taken place in Gdansk, Wroclaw and Poznan - to mention only the most notable examples.