Name: Poland
ISBN: 9780781813013

Poland

"In 1797, Russia, Prussia and Austria divided Poland among themselves, rewriting Polish history to show that they had brought much-needed civilisation to a primitive backwater. But the country they wiped off the map had been one of Europe’s largest and most richly varied, born of diverse cultural traditions and one of the boldest constitutional experiments ever attempted. Its destruction ultimately led to two world wars and the Cold War.Zamoyski’s fully revised history of Poland looks back over a thousand years of turmoil and triumph, chronicling how Poland has been restored at last to its rightful place in Europe."

What Hacker News says

bobthechefJul 2019

People overstate the catastrophic like they overstate the flaws of the liberum veto. Note that this system of government worked for hundreds (longer than most even remotely comparable states) of years and matured over time in precedential fashion. The royal elections were surprisingly civil and orderly. The distribution of power was according to principles of subsidiary. The 19th century provided historians an opportunity for overly critical assessments resulting from a combination of Poles looking for the causes behind the failure of their state and invaders rationalizing their partitioning of Poland.

The ultimate failure of the Polish state is complex, involving a confluence of factors including catastrophic invasions, uprisings, foreign meddling, and internal conflict that stifled necessary reforms to deal with all of these.

A good, short introduction to the development of the Polish state from the 10th century onward is Adam Zamoyski's "Poland: A History"[0].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Poland-History-Adam-Zamoyski/dp/07818...

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lkrubnerNov 2018

For anyone who likes Adam Zamoyski, I include several very long excerpts from his other book here:

http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/poland-was-shockingly...

When I started dating a woman from Poland I decided I should learn something about the history of her country, and she recommend Adam Zamoyski to me.

I was surprised to learn about Poland. When I wrote “Poland was shockingly liberal during the 1400s” I was expressing my discovery of Poland’s experiment with democracy, which every Pole knows about but few other Westerners know about.

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