HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY VIEWS ON THE KHMEL'NYTS'KYI UPRISING 453early modern revolts; national tension is not. Nineteenth-centuryhistorians frequently depicted revolts such as the Dutch and theCatalan as uprisings of united, nationally-conscious communities. Inreaction, twentieth-century historians have stressed how different theearly modern societies of corporate orders were from modern nations,how weakly national consciousness was developed among the widerstrata of the population, and how low the cultural-ethnic communityand its historical territory stood in the hierarchy of loyalties of mostearly modern men. Recently, however, attention has been paid to thephenomenon of national consciousness in early modern Europe, aswell as to the defense of traditional regional liberties by elites and thearousal of popular xenophobia during early modern revolts. 46The subject of national consciousness and national community isessential to the study of the seventeenth-century Commonwealth, astate which comprised many peoples and cultures. Yet that subject iscomplex, because of the difficulty of decoding seventeenth-centuryterms and perceptions. Scholars have shown that it is a mistake to readmodern nationalities into the terms "Polak" or "Lach," "Rusnak" or"Rusyn." It has been pointed out that in the Commonwealth "nation,"or naród, commonly referred to the inhabitants of a region, and thenoften to its szlachta alone. Students of the nobility have emphasizedthe emergence of the concept of a szlachta nation based on Sarmatianideology. Finally, it has been shown that "Polak" and "Lach" weresometimes used to designate the nobility, as opposed to the peasantry,in ethnically Polish as well as non-Polish territories. Terminology isespecially ambiguous for some parts of the Ukraine in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries, because there class, religious, and linguisticfactors converged so that a Polish-speaking, Roman Catholic nobilitycame to rule over a Ukrainian-speaking, Uniate or Orthodox peasantry.4746The essay by J. W. Smit, "The Netherlands Revolution," in Robert Forster andJack P. Greene, eds., Preconditions of Revolution in Early Modern Europe(Baltimore, 1970), pp. 19-54, criticizes earlier national interpretations of the revoltand points out their limitations. For a discussion of national consciousness in theperiod, see Orest Ranum, ed., National Consciousness, History, and PoliticalCulture in Early-Modern Europe (Baltimore, 1975). Also see KonstantinSymmons-Symonolewicz, "National Consciousness in Medieval Europe: Some"Theoretical Problems," Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 8, no. 1 (Spring1981) : 151-66. For a discussion of the need to study the national factor in earlymodern revolts, see Elliott, "Revolution and Continuity in Early Modern Europe,"pp. 47-51.47The most important studies are Stanisław Kot, "Świadomość narodowa w