It is easy to understand the appeal of “national history” to Polish historians of the past several centuries. Theirs was a small medieval state that grew into a powerful commonwealth and one of Europe's largest states by the sixteenth century, disappeared after partitions by imperial neighbors in the late eighteenth century yet regained its sovereignty in 1918, was occupied by Germans and Soviets in 1939 and subjected to wartime occupation and forty years of communist rule, and then emerged as a leader in the struggle to break with Soviet-imposed communism in the 1980s.

Yet it is also worth asking, as Moshe Rosman does in an introductory essay to this volume, “how Polish is Polish history?” By raising additional questions about how we define Poland's historical territory, polities and rulers, nation, and identity, Rosman drives home the point that there is no singular national history of Poland, but instead a multiplicity of multinational ones. In pushing past such traditional models, contributors to this volume are continuing efforts first begun in the mid-1980s to challenge the “conceit,” as Rosman puts it (25), of Poland's mono-national past.

Twenty scholars, primarily from Polish and German institutions, though also representing Israel, Scotland, Ukraine, and the United States, contributed to the volume, which grew out of a 2014 conference. The book is organized chronologically, with sections devoted to the medieval and early modern periods as well as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and includes a wide and intriguing range of approaches, insights, and case studies.

Sketching out the project's conceptual underpinnings, Yvonne Kleinmann combines the insights of Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias—using their terms “configuration” and “figuration” to highlight the importance of local communities, ideologies and ideas, and ethnic, religious, professional status, and cultural groups in spurring social change—with an anthropology-inspired interpretation of “imagination” to make sense of how individuals “materialize the world” (xiii, xiv). Digging deeper into Poland's pasts, in other words, requires paying attention to long-term “structural” shifts (Kleinmann lists “forms of exchange, technics, values, and practices” as examples [xii]) and to how individuals understood and sought to change their own times and places.

While it is impossible to highlight each of the volume's contributions, two broad foci emerge. The first, in keeping with Rosman's question, is an effort to problematize the “Polishness” of Poland's past by highlighting the interplay of multiple national and religious groups as well as the fluid, fuzzy, and even nonexistent boundaries between them. In his piece on medieval concepts like “origin,” “customs,” “religion,” and “law,” for example, Jürgen Heyde argues that such ostensibly immutable “ethnic markers” (85 ff.) were in fact malleable and contextual. In one telling example, he notes the interplay between formal and informal legal systems when it came to foreign artisans, peasants, administrators, and warriors who were in demand for their skills but lacked formal legal status (and thus risked enslavement if they settled outside their home countries). Informal “hospitality laws” allowed monarchs and others to “host” such people, paying for their expertise and protecting them from legal harm (95, 96). Using geospatial analysis to track the distribution of buildings of worship before the first partition of 1772, Bogumił Szady seeks to overcome the limitations of available sources and present a broad view of the late Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's religious makeup. He delineates its heterogeneous borderlands (Latin-Uniate and Uniate-Orthodox in the east and Lutheran-Roman Catholic in the north and west) and highlights the relative heterogeneity of towns and cities (almost 60 per cent of which had buildings of worship for more than one religion) compared to villages (just over 2% had multiple such buildings; 200). Exploring a later period, Olga Linkiewicz compares mythicized meta-narratives of the eastern borderlands (Kresy), which depict the territory as an idyllic landscape and “last bastion of western [Polish] culture” (336), with the personal accounts of Kresy Poles forcibly resettled to Lower Silesia after World War II, and finds key differences. Informants describe day to day interactions driven primarily by familial ties and village-level interests and politics, in which labels like “Polish” and “Ukrainian” were used to connote social status and daily practices rather than ethnicity in a narrow sense. Discussing interlocutors’ common refrain that “there was no difference” (nie było róźnicy) between such groups, Linkiewicz suggests either that language and religion were non-issues given villagers’ shared social and cultural contexts, or that the phrase implied “reassurance that there was no conflict” (346). Either way, “this local story,” in Linkiewicz's words, “is not a national one” (349).

If power is an implicit factor in the stories highlighted above, it is the central focus for contributors who have turned away from traditional explorations of Poland's statehood and leaders to explore informal mechanisms of political authority and legitimacy. As Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz argues in her piece on the centrality of “talking matters through” (ucieranie materii, 123) in the early Commonwealth, debates about words like “commonwealth” and “liberty” directly influenced policy-making. By the eighteenth century, such terms had become ossified and were little more than “exalted platitudes” (134), a status quo that both reflected and spurred the Commonwealth's decline. Karin Friedrich challenges nineteenth- and twentieth-century critiques of magnate Bogusław Radziwiłł’s “treasonous” decision to ally with Sweden during the mid-seventeenth century wars, highlighting his multiple loyalties to the Commonwealth, but also to Lithuania, his family's landholdings, his Protestant co-religionists, and his “image of himself as a prince … unrestricted by political borders” (163). Kornelia Kończal digs into the micropolitics of power after World War II, tracing the varied meanings of “plunder” (szaber/szabrować) used by looters themselves. She documents the term's remarkable malleability and its broad social acceptance, also showing that while state-issued communiques were uniformly critical, government officials themselves were far more equivocal, even condoning plunder in specific instances. “In a sense,” writes Kończal, “post-war reconstruction … was carried out through plunder” (306).

Repeatedly as I read this collection, I was reminded of Rogers Brubaker's foundational work on identity not as what people are, but as what they perceive, make, and do (see in particular Ethnicity Without Groups, 2006, and his volume on fieldwork in Cluj, Romania, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town, 2008.) Only one scholar in this volume cited Brubaker, something I found quite surprising given his work in eastern Europe and the broader relevance of his ideas. After all, what this varied and worthwhile volume illuminates most clearly is the many ways people over the centuries sought to make “Poland” and “Polishness” their own, and the many stories scholars can—and should—tell as a result.