Patrimonialism, Elite Networks, and Reform in Late-Eighteenth-Century Poland

Poland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was more a mélange of patrimonially organized latifundia than a sovereign state. Literature on the organization of work and politics on these magnate estates has identified a layer of voluntaristic clientage ties astride a set of more lopsided, purely patrimonial relations. Boundaries separating the personnel of these various estates were firm; estates were mutually autonomous, competing economic and political organizations. National politics was characterized both by contests between a weak, elective monarchy and overwhelmingly powerful lords and by shifting factional alliances among these lords to achieve political ascendancy. While factional politics was unstable for much of the eighteenth century, shifts in the social network organization of elites in the last quarter of that century, combined with a retooling of traditional political cultural symbols, facilitated the “invention†of a constitutional regime in 1791—a remarkable accomplishment of political order out of disorder.