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by a historian of eastern central Europe who is interested in theoretical
debates as well as the history of historiography, and who has not
only mastered her subject in the narrow sense, but is also extremely
well versed in the modern research on identity and nationalism. The
fact that �riedrich, lecturer in history at the School of Slavonic and
European Languages, University College London, also writes well
and fluently means that reading this ambitious book not only furthers
our knowledge, but is also an intellectual pleasure.
One factor which contributes to this is the clear internal structure
of the work. In comparable German studies, the table of contents
alone would fill several pages, whereas in the book under review it
lists eight chapters, plus an introduction in which �riedrich discusses
some of the historiographical problems mentioned above, and a
conclusion which, unfortunately, does not recapitulate the findings
of the book as expected, but glances forward at conditions in the centralist
Prussian monarchy in the nineteenth century. In eight steps,
�riedrich explores the questions she poses at the beginning concerning
the origins of and motives behind the strongly political orientation
and active participation of the Royal Prussian aristocratic and
bourgeois élites in the political system of the Commonwealth. In the
foreground is the frequently researched historical constitutional connection
between Royal Prussia and the Polish crown, which changed
markedly as a result of the Union of Lublin (1569). Previously, the
political Estates—the aristocratic senators, representatives of the
three big central areas, the smaller towns, and noble representatives
from the three palatinates (województwo) of Pomerelia, Marienburg,
and Culm—had been represented as a whole in the Polish senate or
in the chamber of deputies. The Union of Lublin changed all this.
Henceforth the Prussian noble Estates—and this also affected
Danzig, Elbing, and Thorn—no longer had a permanent place in the
new union’s structure of Reichstag and Landtag. They felt that they
were being treated like the Estates of a province rather than of an
autonomous Land. Despite these constitutional changes, and in spite
of all the potential for conflict between the big Prussian towns, the
king, and the republic, which went as far as a military exchange of
blows, the author demonstrates, by drawing upon examples from
contemporary political philosophy and historiography, that no alternative
was conceived to the tie between the Land and the union:
‘Unlike most histories of German Hanseatic cities in the Empire,
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