Social And Cultural Relations In The Grand Duchy Of Lithuania

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was one of the largest and most linguistically, ethnically and religiously diverse polities in late medieval and early modern Europe. In the mid-1380s the Grand Duchy of Lithuania entered into a long process of union with the Kingdom of Poland. Since the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, the history and memory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania have been much contested among its successor nations. This volume aims to excavate a level below their largely incompatible narratives. Instead, in an encounter with freshly discovered or long neglected sources, the authors of this book seek new understanding of the Grand Duchy, its citizens and inhabitants in "microhistories." Emphasizing urban and rural spaces, families, communities, networks, and travels, this book presents fresh research by established and emerging scholars.

An Unproclaimed Empire: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania is an interdisciplinary study of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) that is historical in subject but social scientific in approach. It is also the first study to apply this comparative and social scientific method to the GDL. In this book, Zenonas Norkus draws on national historiographies and applies theories from comparative empire studies involving historians, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and scholars in the theory of international relations, allowing it to transcend differences in national viewpoints. It also provides answers to contested issues in the history of the GDL, and raises a number of new questions, including whether the Grand Duchy was an empire or a federation, and why and when it failed. By adopting this "imperial approach" of considering the GDL as an empire, this book brings something new to the research surrounding the Grand Duchy and is ideal for academics and postgraduates of early modern Lithuania, early modern Eastern Europe, historical sociology, and the history of empires.

The focus of this book is the unique socio-political and socio-cultural community of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the golden age of the late fifteenth to early seventeenth century. This study analyses the cultural and political impact of the values disseminated in the newly created state, such as the concept of the state itself, its governance, representation, laws, and other elements of the socio-political system. Through theoretical and factographic arguments, this book demonstrates that the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a social, political, and cultural link between geopolitical and geo-cultural spaces of the Roman West and the Byzantine East. Located at the cultural crossroads of Europe, Lithuania was an ethnically diverse, multilingual, multi-faith, multicultural national space. Nurtured by international contacts, its political system developed rapidly, influencing the formation of geopolitical and geo-cultural mentality of the whole Central Eastern European region.

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.

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.

This book aims to create an integral picture of the social, economic and cultural history of the Jews in Lithuania during the course of more than six hundred years - from the Middle Ages to the 1990s. It is a translation of the study "Lietuvos žydai. Istorinė studija" (Engl. "Lithuanian Jews. Historical study"), published in Lithuanian in 2012. The Book was written by an interna-tional group of scholars from Lithuania, Israel, the United States of America and Germany. The world of Lithuanian Jewry is reconstructed through different aspects of the development of community and society: demography, social and economic activity, self-government institutions of the community, cultural and religious movements, literature and the press, education, discriminative policy of the authorities and relations with the dominant church, segregation, assimilation and changes of identity, anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.

Peoples of Eastern Europe -- Ethnicity on the edge of extinction -- Linguistic nationalism -- Nationality struggles : from idea to movement -- Insurgent nationalism : Serbia and Poland -- Cursed are the peacemakers : 1848 in East Central Europe -- The reform that made the monarchy unreformable : the 1867 compromise -- 1878 Berlin Congress : Europe's new ethno-nation states -- The origins of National Socialism : fin de siecle Hungary and Bohemia -- Liberalism's heirs and enemies : socialism vs. nationalism -- Peasant utopias : villages of yesterday and societies of tomorrow -- 1919 : a new Europe and its old problems -- The failure of national self-determination -- Fascism takes root : Iron Guard and Arrow Cross -- East Europe's anti-fascism -- Hitler's war and its East European enemies -- What Dante did not see : the Holocaust in Eastern Europe -- People's democracy : early postwar Eastern Europe -- Cold War and Stalinism -- Destalinization : Hungary's revolution -- National paths to communism : the 1960s -- 1968 and the Soviet bloc : reform communism -- Real existing socialism : life in the Soviet bloc -- The unraveling of communism -- 1989 -- East Europe explodes : the wars of Yugoslav succession -- East Europe joins Europe.

The region called Livonia (corresponding to modern Estonia and Latvia) emerged out of the rapid transformation caused by the conquest, Christianisation and colonisation on the north-east shore of the Baltic Sea in the late twelfth and the early thirteenth centuries. These radical changes have received increasing scholarly notice over the last few decades. However, less attention has been devoted to the interplay between the new and the old structures and actors in a longer perspective. This volume aims to study these interplays and explores the history of Livonia by concentrating on various actors and networks from the late twelfth to the seventeenth century. But, on a deeper level, the goal is more ambitious: to investigate the foundation of an increasingly complex and heterogeneous society on the medieval and early modern Baltic frontier – ‘the making of Livonia’.