ABSTRACT
The case of Poland in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries offers an especially interesting field of research because of some characteristic traits of its economic and social development. The urbanization of Western Europe in early modern times resulted in a rapid rise of demand for food on international markets. Poland, an agricultural country, ruled by grain-producing nobles, became a granary of Europe in the sixteenth to the first half of the seventeenth century. The market economy and the new methods of capitalist production, however, had not emerged on a larger scale in Poland. Polish towns, although numerous, were small in size and weak; because the noble manor needed unpaid labour to produce food for export, peasants were forced into a second serfdom. On the threshold of modern times, Poland – a peripheral area of the European world economy – remained a traditionally agricultural country run under a manorial system based on serf labour and with a hierarchical society dominated by the gentry.1 The importance of the role of the family as a production unit remained unchallenged until the end of the eighteenth century.
