Poland is a country which sporadically hits the headlines of the Anglo-Saxon world. It has suffered the dubious distinction of being wiped off the political map in 1795, to be resurrected after the First World War, only to suffer apparent annihilation during the Second and reduction to satellite status of the Soviet Union, to emerge in the van of resistance to Soviet domination during the 1980s. Yet the history of Poland remains comparatively little known. This book offers a primarily political outline of its turbulent and complex past, from medieval times to the present day, and is the only brief history of the country available in English. The pre-1795 Polish state had become a byword for political weakness before its erasure from the map; yet from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century it was one of the dominant forces of central and eastern Europe. It was also the scene of a remarkable experiment in consensual, constitutional politics, in an area embracing much of not only...