Self-Government in the Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1569-1795

The Union of Poland-Lithuania was the largest state in early modern Europe. It was a union state comprising territories that are now wholly or partly in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia and Estonia. National history has neglected these early modern composite monarchies and union states, working on the assumption that unitary nation states were the hallmark of political modernity. Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century, in stark contrast to the absolute monarchies that were constructed in neighbouring states such as Russia, Austria, and Prussia, the Polish-Lithuanian union state represented a bold constitutional experiment based on participatory citizenship, an elective monarchy and religious toleration. Traditional scholarship has focused on the extent to which the Commonwealth embodied the principles of the ‘Golden Liberties’ of the szlachta, the nobles who formed the citizen body, but has neglected the relationship between the Renaissance comcept of Liberty, and its necessary concomitant of self government, an issue recently explored by Quentin Skinner. This PhD project invites students to explore the extent to which .the principle of self-government permeated not just the szlachta citizen body, but other communities often seen has having been excluded from the exercise of power: the cities, the village commune, and minority communities, including Jews, Tatars, and Scots. The increasing availability online of local court books from the union state makes possible a series of PhD projects based on local court records in which the culture of self-government is most clearly revealed.