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    The Partitions of Poland, 1772–1795

    The Partitions of Poland refers to a series of partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which took place between 1772 and 1795 through which Poland’s more powerful neighbors, Prussia, Austria and Russia, divided up the country between them. The lands involved extended beyond Poland to include large sections of what is now western and central Ukraine and much of Belarus. The partitions were made feasible as Poland had declined dramatically as a European power in the eighteenth century, whereas its neighbors, particularly Prussia, had grown in strength. The third partition resulted in the extinguishing of the Polish state and beyond the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw as a French satellite state in Eastern Europe at the time of the Napoleonic Wars a Polish state would not emerged again until 1918 after the collapse of the German Empire at the end of the First World War. The partitions resulted in considerable demographic shifts in Eastern Europe that have had implications for demography, family history and genealogical studies.[1]

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    Partitions of Poland chronology of events

    In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Poland was one of Europe’s great powers. The Union of Lublin in 1569 resulted in the amalgamation of the Duchy of Lithuania with the Kingdom of Poland to create the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Territorially this was the largest state in Europe bar Russia, with lands that covered not just modern-day Poland, but also much of the Baltic States region around Lithuania and the Kaliningrad Oblast, much of Belarus, western and central Ukraine and for a time even some lands which fall inside Russia today. However, in the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it emerged as a loser in several of the Northern Wars involving the emergent Russian state, Sweden and other regional powers. By way of contrast, three of its close neighbors, Russia, Austria and Prussia were expanding in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[2]

    New problems arose in the eighteenth century. Firstly, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was failing to modernize and evolve in the same way which most of the more westerly powers of the continent were, with growing bureaucracies and more powerful state apparatuses, as well as more effective armies and greater technology. Secondly, Poland went through numerous succession problems from the late sixteenth century onwards following the dying out of the direct line of the Jagiellon Dynasty. This led to the Commonwealth being ruled over time by various foreign royal families such as the House of Vasa of Sweden in the seventeenth century, while the rulers of the Duchy of Saxony in Germany became the rulers of Poland in the eighteenth century. These latter developments opened Poland up to considerable foreign intrigue.[3]

    King Stanislaw August Poniatowski

    The governments of Austria, Prussia and Russia were plotting from as early as the 1730s to divide up portions of the Commonwealth between them. These plans were finally realized from the early 1770s onwards, in part because the reigning King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania at that time, Stanislaw August Poniatowski was a lover of Queen Catherine the Great of Russia. A border conflict in what is now Ukraine with Russia in the late 1760s and early 1770s, known as the War of the Bar Confederation, led to the First Partition of Poland in 1772. Through this Russia acquired lands in what is now eastern Belarus and Russia west of Smolensk. Austria acquired the Galicia region into western Ukraine, including the city of Lviv. Prussia acquire extensive territory along the Baltic Sea, running from what is now north-eastern Germany eastwards to Lithuania, including the city of Gdansk.[4]

    A Second Partition quickly followed in 1793, via which Russia in particular gained extensive territory in Ukraine and Belarus, including the city of Minsk. The Third Partition occurred just two years later. Through this the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ceased to exist. Warsaw was briefly acquired by Prussia, though in the peace settlement after the Napoleonic Wars it passed to Russia. The three powers, Prussia, Austria and Russia would continue to rule these lands through to the early twentieth century, in the Prussian case as part of the German Empire from 1871 onwards and as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1867 onwards in Austria’s case.[5]

    Extent of migration associated with the Partitions of Poland

    There was extensive migration associated with the Partitions of Poland, both in the immediate and long term. In the immediate term communities of Polish nationalists and aristocrats who had resisted one or another of the three conquering powers left Poland and established émigré communities in countries like Britain, Italy, Turkey and France, particularly in London and Paris. Here they would petition for aid in re-establishing a Polish state for many decades to come, notably hoping for Britain to facilitate this as part of the wide-ranging peace settlements which brought the Napoleonic Wars to an end, a goal which proved unsuccessful.[6]

    This latter migration consisted of little more than a few thousand immigrants in various locations. Much more substantial was the manner in which the Prussians, Russians and Austrians colonized the lands they acquired through the partitions, with German settlers in particular arriving in large numbers into East Prussia and the other Polish lands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This led to a significant Germanization of a large part of what is now northern and western Poland. Austrian and Russian efforts at this kind of ‘internal colonization’ were less systematic, as they had many other territories in places like the Balkans, the Crimea and the Caucasus which required internal colonization as well.[7]

    Demographic impact of the Partitions of Poland

    Distribution of the Polish-American community today

    The full demographic impact of the partitions is hard to precisely assess. It was significant, though other factors were also at work. For instance, from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, several million people left the lands that had formerly constituted the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, moving in large numbers to the United States where they had a huge and lasting impact on the demography of the country, particularly states like Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Missouri and cities like Cleveland and Chicago. The Polish American community today is an estimated ten million people as a result of this, while a large percentage of the Jewish American community are the descendants of Ashkenazic Jews who left the former lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for places like New York.[8]

    Some of this migration was simply part and parcel of the mass European migration to the Americas between 1800 and 1920, as population levels exploded in the Old World, and as such cannot be directly attributed to the Partitions of Poland. Yet other elements of this migration were products of the Partitions. For instance, many of the Jewish people who arrived to America during this era were fleeing the Anti-Semitic policies of the Russian imperial government. Polish attitudes towards its very large Jewish population had been welcoming and benign for centuries. Therefore, at least some of this Jewish migration was owing to the shift in official policies towards the Jews of Eastern Europe which followed from the Partitions of Poland. Other forms of economic disadvantage and imperial exploitation of the Polish subjects of Austria, Prussia and Russia also fuelled Polish migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As such, at least some individuals who are trying to track their ancestors who left the former lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between 1795 and 1918 might well find that their forbears ended up in the US or another country at least partly owing to the Partitions of Poland.[9]

    See also

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    References

    1. ↑ The 3 Partitions of Poland (& Lithuania): Polarized Peoples. The Collector
    2. ↑ Great Northern War. WorldHistory
    3. ↑ Daniel Stone, The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795 (Seattle, 2001).
    4. ↑ M. B., ‘The Partitions of Poland’, in Bulletin of International News, Vol. 16, No. 21 (October, 1939), pp. 3–12.
    5. ↑ Jerzy Lukowski, The Partitions of Poland, 1772, 1793, 1795 (London, 1999).
    6. ↑ J. Zubrzycki, ‘Emigration from Poland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Population Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (March, 1953), pp. 248–272.
    7. ↑ Robert Lewis Koehl, ‘Colonialism inside Germany: 1886–1918’, in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 25, No. 3 (September, 1953), pp. 255–272.
    8. ↑ Dorota Praszałowicz, ‘Overseas Migration from Partitioned Poland: Poznania and Eastern Galicia as Case Studies’, in Polish American Studies, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 59–81.
    9. ↑ [https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/pogroms POGROMS. Holocaust Encylopedia. United States Holocaust Museum


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