ABSTRACT
The dominance of the szlachta was never more secure from domestic challenge than in the eighteenth century. The wars of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries so debilitated commercial and urban elements that they could never even begin to contemplate rivaling the nobility, ambitious commoners sought to join nobles, not to displace them. The traditional values and world of the Polish nobility, where political liberty was their exclusive preserve and their economic security was assured through an obedient serf labor force, did not, however, go without questioning from within the szlachta estate itself. The nobility were left in no doubt after the mid-1760s that their world was under challenge, not only from the forces of external, principally Russian, intervention but also from within their own ranks. The effect of the Statute was not only to open up wide avenues of ennoblement on a formal basis to non-Jewish townsmen.
