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BOOK REVIEWS
KARIN �RIEDRICH, The Other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland and Liberty,
1569–1772 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), xxi +
280 pp. ISBN 0 521 58335 7. £40.00. $US 64.95
During the first half of the twentieth century, the Estate-based society
of late medieval and early modern times fascinated historians from
states with very different political systems. The International Historians’
Congress held in Warsaw in 1933, at which east-central and
eastern Europe figured much more prominently than they had done
at any previous congress, represented an important breakthrough for
comparative research on the European Estates. On the initiative of
the Belgian historians Emil Lousse and Henri Pirenne, the foundations
were laid for the Commission Internationale pour l’Histoire des
Assemblées d’Etats, which came into being three years later. To the
present day, the commission provides the central institutional framework
for this branch of research. The considerable achievements
which the commission notched up in its early years demonstrated
that ‘Histoire comparative’, proclaimed as a programme at the Paris
Congress of 1900, could usefully be applied to the topic of the Estates
and their assemblies. But why did the scholars of eastern central Europe
in particular study the history of the Estates? Long before and long after
1918, the system of Estates provided a widely used platform on which
to articulate social aspirations and to legitimize political actions, or, at
times of crisis, to prop up national self-confidence. In more general
terms, the Estates were interesting as the bearers of national traditions
and reform attempts, they expressed the potential for resistance to all
forms of monarchical-autocratic state integration, and they stood for
an assumed continuity from the corporative representative assemblies
of the past to the parliamentary-democratic constitutional forms of the
present. To sum up, it was no coincidence that historians in all the
states created after the �irst World War from the Baltic to the Adriatic
had a heightened interest in the culture of liberty of eastern central
Europe. There were clearly peak times for working on this topic, and
they can be correlated with political history. To this extent, to study this
topic also involved a contemporary historical and political dimension.
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