“There were three taverns, / Four gate remains, / nine monasteries / and houses here and there”—the vison of a provincial town in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth depicted in a poem of Ignacy Krasicki from 1778 corresponded to the way the urban problem was perceived in the milieu of the Polish Enlightenment's adherents. The overwhelming majority of the towns were small, with wooden buildings and poor, neglected hygienic infrastructure. With their semi-agricultural character, propination, and selling of alcohol as the most profitable source of income for inhabitants, they were perceived by the advocates of progress as a visible symbol of backwardness and stagnation. Regrets over the decline of the towns and proposals to improve their condition were the common motive of public disputes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The most frequently proposed remedy was the involvement of the central government, acting in urban matters simultaneously as the supervisor of the town magistracies and promoter of the changes forcing order and modernity. The reforms aiming to establish a “good order” in towns were initiated in the period of the Great Diet (1788–1792). They were continued after the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian administrations, or by the Polish one in the surrogates of the Polish state—the Duchy of Warsaw (1807–1815) and the Kingdom of Poland (created in 1815).

The conviction that the activity of the central government was the only real remedy for the stagnation and backwardness of the towns at the turn of eighteenth century was broadly accepted by Polish historiography. The efforts of so-called boni ordinis commissions created during the reign of King Stanislaw August and similar institutions in the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland were perceived as the example of a reasonable endeavor to save the independence of the state by promoting its modernity. They constitute an essential element of Polish historical memory even today.

From this point of view, Curtis G. Murphy's book offers a different perspective. The study deals with the problem of change in both the urban politics of the ruling elites and the political and legal status of the towns’ inhabitants from the last decades of 1700s (the Stanislaw August ascension to the throne in 1764 was the caesura) to about 1860s, when some consequences of previous political tendencies and solutions had become more apparent. The author examines this question through the changing situation of the towns located in the central, eastern, or southeastern territories of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which after 1807 were transferred to the Duchy of Warsaw or remained under the Russian rule, although some comparisons to Prussian and Austrian partitions are taken into account too. The author takes under consideration the cases of royal (then called the national) towns, as well as the private ones, which makes his reflections more complex. The study is based on archival sources from four archives in Poland and Ukraine and a solid collection of published sources. The author argues with historiographic conclusions concerning urban question in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His knowledge of the historical and cultural context regarding the questions at stake is commendable. I found only a few minor mistakes, like the date of the fall of the November Uprising (3), or the name of publicist and political activist Franciszek Barss (34).

The main thesis of the study is the opposite of the traditional historiographic approach. The activity of central government institutions (regardless Polish or partitioning powers) is perceived as typical for the Enlightenment prejudices against local and estate privileges. Striving to create a modern, unified state fostering progress, the ruling elite forced uniformity in law, tax collection, and administration. In the case of Commonwealth towns, the consequence was an end to their autonomy and independence, and the destruction of a special kind of political mentality of the townsmen described by the author as civic republicanism, resulting from the consciousness of their specific legal status based on former privileges. After a few decades, the “citizens of the city” changed into “residents.” The price for the change was not progress and modernity, but deeper stagnation and inertia. The rationally-schematized state failed in its aims.

The problem of impulses for modernity in east central Europe in the nineteenth century remains unresolved, as the author slightly evades answering the question: what forces were able to play the role of the real promoters of change? Nevertheless, there is no doubt that his thesis, although controversial for some, is intellectually invigorating.