moshe rosman

Studies in shifting ideas of community and society throughout a thousand years of Polish history.

As a European polity, Poland can look back on more than a thousand years of history. Over the centuries, however, its territory, contexts of political power, and demographic structure have varied greatly. The authors maintain that these societal developments and differentiations cannot be clearly discerned through a national or macro-political lens, and as such have kept the perspectives of nation and state in the background, focussing instead on considerably smaller political, social, or cultural units.
The conceptual impetus for this volume has generated questions about how people within Polish society imagined their world, and how such perceptions, images, and ideas of community and society have changed over time: Did shifts in political power have an impact on local communities? What were the criteria that determined membership in the political or cultural elite? What alternatives or competing ideas of community can be identified? How were ethnic boundaries defined? Were multiple loyalties part of political culture? In what ways did socially or politically marginalized groups organize themselves? How did war and migration influence social change?