Baltic Commerce and Urban Society, 1500-1700: Gdansk/Danzig and Its Polish Context by Maria s> Bogucka (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 759 between text and illustrationis not always clear, or that the necessaryreference to the illustrationis buried in the text. A classicinstance occurs on page 28 which is headed by two titles, the first the title to an illustrationof the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo which is in fact overleaf, and the second the title to the Shubert map of Tsarskoe Selo which appears opposite. Here and elsewherepossible confusion is compounded by the failureto provide an English translation to many of the titles. In fact, to be sure of one's way through this book one needs some command of several European languages, including Russian. It is obviously not a book meant for the masses. That said, the editor and his team should be congratulatedon the superb qualityof many of the printswhich both bring the city to life and successfully convey something of its unique atmosphere.For that reason alone this book is well worth adding to one's personal library. School of Geography, EarthandEnvironmental Sciences DENIS J. B. SHAW University ofBirmingham Bogucka, Maria.Baltic Commerce andUrban Society, I500-I700: Gdansk/Danzig and its Polish Context. Variorum Collected Studies Series: Studies in EastCentral Europe. Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington,VT, 2003. x + 3I2 pp. Tables. Notes. Index. C57.50? THE work of Maria Bogucka, member of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw,has influencedsocial and economic historiansof the Balticsfor many decades, especially before the fall of Communism, when she was one of the few historiansin her native Poland, who could not only travel (withinlimits) but was also translated and published in West European languages. This volume makes her scholarlylegacy availablein a neat package, as it contains severalof her articlesalreadypublishedin translationbetween I973 and I999. This quartercenturyof historicalresearchreflectsnot only the transformation of Bogucka's own interests,but wider changes in the political and historiographical currents of Poland, from an intense focus on economic history to social history and finally to issues of culture, gender and communication. Earlyarticles,which combine 'hard-core'economic researchon trade figures with an ideological concern about 'luxuryconsumption' among the nobility, mirrorthe approachto earlymodern Polishsocietymore or less prescribedby Poland'sofficialpolitical orientationduringthe I970s.For a readershiptoday, while ignoringsuch politicalglosses,it can stillbe usefulto be remindedof the basics of the shipping trade between Danzig, Stockholm, the Netherlands and the rest of Europe, as Bogucka always unearths interestingfigures and comparative dimensions. Several articlesof the late I970S and early I98os reflect the effort Bogucka made, despite political limitations,to connect with Western historiographical trends, when she stressesthe similaritiesand differencesof the urban Reformation in Poland and Western Europe. Much of the superiorityshe finds in Protestantmodels of development in contrastto the failureof the Reformation in Poland sounds odd in the light of a more recent historiographyof 760 SEER, 84, 4, 2006 the Reformation, which attributes reformist thinking to both confessional camps. Quite a few of her results on the development of Polish towns have been revised (e.g. the negative evaluation of the guild system, the scarcityof 'productiveinvestment', etc.) both by Polish urban historiansand in a wider European comparative context. Neither did West European nobilities less despise or look down on their town-dwellersthan did the Polish nobility, nor would Polish burghersembrace noble culture more eagerly than their counterparts in the West. As recent studies of the role of self-confident urban communitiesin the Swedish and Muscovite Deluge have shown, Polish towndwellers did not represent quite so passive and oppressed a citizenry as Bogucka then seemed to think. It is tricky, therefore, to argue about pieces of research twenty or more years old, considerablylimited by the political agenda and a restrictedability to visit archives abroad. Despite some in-depth studies, particularlyon the cities of Royal Prussia, and specifically Danzig, on which Bogucka excels, some articles consciously generalize and remain very much on the surface, such as 'The towns of East-CentralEurope from the fourteenthto the seventeenth century' of I985. It is not clear what benefit readerscould draw from these today, unless they wanted to study the development of Polish historiographyon the subject.More interestingare Bogucka'sattemptsto incorporate culturalaspects into urban history.The comparisonof Cracow, Warsawand Danzig and their functions as 'metropoles', published in I996 in German, might have gained from translationinto Englishfor the benefit of...