For 13th‑century Gdańsk, as for other cities of medieval Europe, it was important to create a community identity, which was expressed in the symbolism of seals and later also heraldic colours and coats of arms. In Gdańsk a seal of 78 mm in diameter, which survives on a document dating from 1299 (hence from pre‑Teutonic times), depicts an unmanned cog borne along by the waves. In late medieval Gdańsk, as in other Hanseatic towns, power belonged to elite families, who formed a ruling group. During 1454–1525 families such as the Falckes, Bischofs, Bocks, Ferbers, Scheweckes, Suchtens, and Zimmermanns each had two members who served as mayors. Maritime contacts played one of the most vital roles in the social and economic life of late medieval Gdańsk, and these included trade links with the English –competitors of the Hanse who could not be taken lightly.

The 17th and 18th centuries were a period of the development of art and science in Gdańsk. Johann Hevelius, was the most famous astronomer of that time. He cooperated with the best artists: Jeremias Falck, Daniel Schultz and Andreas Stech. Hevelius’s second wife Elisabeth was also dedicated to science and the couple were shown together at work. Scientists” collections and cabinets in Gdańsk provided a platform for the exchange of ideas. The artists interested in observing nature were incorporated into the circle of discussants. Samuel Niedenthal who studied both the fauna and flora worked together with two other researchers and collectors form Gdańsk: Christoph Gottwald – doctor of medicine and botanist – Jacob Breyne. Gdansk naturalists themselves attempted to draw or to sculpt. Passions for art and science as well as collecting have sometimes been continued by subsequent generations. Johann Philipp Breyne and Jacob Theodor Klein supported the artistic education of their daughters. Their drawings were both used as models to make scientific illustrations and were artistic objects used also for exchange. Gdańsk scientists collected paintings, drawings, prints, and scientific as well as natural specimens. Their collections were dynamic and consistent with the emerging idea of a nature and art” developed by Gottfried Leibniz.

Commercial treaties between states played a crucial role in shaping overseas trade and the mercantile communities that lived among in the Baltic borderland. This article takes as its example the Anglo‑Russian treaty of commerce of 1766 between Britain and Russia to explore how Britain in particular negotiated commercial treaties. It shows the crucial role of commercial expertise, and particularly the British Russia Company, in shaping the treaty to best serve British interests. Britain’s reliance on commercial interests for expertise, meanwhile, was crucial to maintaining its supply of naval stores. The article then explores the impact of the treaty on mercantile networks in the Baltic, arguing that the fluidity of citizenship and national affiliation allowed the merchants of the former Hanseatic towns in particular to adapt and benefit from commercial treaties between states, a process that merits further research. The intersection of state and commercial interests was fundamental to commerce in the Baltic borderlands.

Russia’s expansion in the Baltic region in the 18th century was neither an obvious nor historically justified direction. It was Peter I who abandoned the expansion to the south and east in favor of the west. The rise of Russia’s power on the Baltic was linked to the decline in importance of the 17th‑century powers blocking its path to Europe: Sweden, the Polish‑Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Ottoman Empire. When Peter I the Great took power Russia had no access to either the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea or the Sea of Azov. However, thanks to Peter I’s consistent policy and the actions of subsequent Russian rulers, during the 18th century Russia not only gained access to the Baltic Sea, but also conquered several strategically important ports and became the largest naval power in that area. A symbolic confirmation of the change in the direction of Russian policy in the 18th century can be the transfer of the capital of the state from Moscow to St. Petersburg in 1712. St. Petersburg was a “window on Europe”for Russia and the wide access to the Baltic Sea enabled Russia to influence the fate of the whole of Europe. This article tries to identify the most crucial moments and events that determined the success of Russian policy on the Baltic in the 18th century.

During the Napoleonic Wars, in 1807, Britain attacked the small neutral state of Denmark without direct provocation, bombarded Copenhagen, seized its navy, and temporarily occupied part of its territory. Killing and displacing thousands of civilians, this was a highly traumatic experience for survivors and deeply controversial among contemporaries. This article examines how debates over the legitimacy of the attack were framed within predominant understandings of international law. International law at the turn of the 19th century was characterized by a dualism containing both the “Law of Nations” and “Law of Nature.”By utilizing divergent aspects of these discourses, the article shows how critics and defenders of the British military action were both able to frame their positions within existing frameworks of nascent international law.

The article aims to analyze the opinions of British newspapers about Russia and its foreign policy –precisely the Eastern Question between 1855 and 1878. The research was based on the editorial articles published on the pages of the most influential London dailies. The Crimean war of 1855 and the war scare of 1878 confirmed the already existing negative stereotypes of Russia as the aggressive and barbarian power able to threaten the British interests in the Eastern Mediterranean. The press was divided along party lines yet the general picture was similar despite its liberal or conservative affiliations. The factor determining the ultimate attitude of the press towards Russia was the security of British possession.

The paper is devoted to the representation of Protestants in the stories (legends and miracles) about the miraculous images of Our Lady that come from the territories of the (former) Grand Duchy of Lithuania: involving those currently incorporated in Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine. It considers first the representation of both the locals who converted to Protestantism from Orthodoxy or Catholicism in the 16th–17th century and the Lutheran Swedish invaders of the 17th–18th century by their contemporaries and later investigates into how the image of Protestants changed with the course of time up to nowadays and what had an impact on this. Interestingly, that since the 19th century military invaders from Sweden were described in interchangeable manner with the French soldiers of Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops. And now we are witnessing the genesis of a German Nazi soldiers presentation in the miracles attributed to Virgin Mary’s images/icons.

On the wave of the so‑called II iconoclasm, which encompassed northern Europe, similar movements, or rather local iconoclastic actions, were revealed in the Polish Republic in the modern period (16th–18th century), wherever the voice of the dissenters was more intense, especially those representing more radical fractions of Protestant circles. Examples of iconoclastic acts from various regions of the former Polish‑Lithuanian Commonwealth resemble occurrences known from the period of Byzantine iconoclasm although these parallels are more clearly visible in the literary aspect, as the political‑religious freedom in the Polish‑Lithuanian Commonwealth allowed for the publication of even openly anti‑Catholic texts. Criticism of Polish Protestants towards Catholic religious practices was directed mainly against three manifestations of public religiosity, which they stigmatised in their polemics: Processions, the cult of selected Marian images, and the cult of relics and devotional practices related to the votive offerings. In this publication, certain problems are hinted at in relation to these manifestations of public devotion widespread in Res Publica Poloniae.

This chapter considers the Baltic Sea as a unique conduit for Russia’s transcultural exchange, with all the imperialist rivalry that this entailed. It takes as its case study a handful of portraits that the Danish artist Vigilius Eriksen painted for Catherine the Great in the 1760s and ‘70s, and the way in which their circulation and display enabled the empress to become arguably the most efficient ruler of her generation to foster a personal iconography that announced and then cemented her eminence on the European stage. Tracing the trajectories of Eriksen’s portraits reveals a commanding nexus between political ascendency, international relations, and visual imagery, and the function of paintings as highly charged conductors of regal clout around the Baltic Sea. Collectively, they engaged with power differentials in highly suggestive ways, confirming the vitality with which portraiture constructed and signalled status and authority between some of the Baltic’s most competitive courts.

The architectural heritage and the mode of its analysis and interpretation, especially in the perspective of the national and regional question, can and often does become an issue prone to manipulation. The attempts to define national and regional identity by means of cultural legacy have accompanied research into art and also the creation of modern architecture in the spirit of national Historicism since the 19th century. The place where the phenomena can be observed in a particularly acute way is Gdańsk, a city of extremely complicated identity, multicultural structure, and a rich architectural output, the latter having been on a number of occasions subject to national interpretations or over‑interpretations.

The architecture of Gdańsk has for years been the subject of a heated debate of both German and Polish architects, historians of architecture, and conservators. In recent years politicians have also joined in the debate, and so have writers. Discussed have been the general attempts to define factors and means of visual identification, definitions of cultural belonging, and definitions of the historical‑architectural affiliation of the cultural heritage of the city. Another debate issue has been the need to apply all this heritage or its elements to the creation of the urban landscape (both as new districts and filling in the architectural substance in the old ones) as clear signs of regional identification. At the same time, the majority of monuments have become the subject of scholarly abuse and interpretative manipulation, used for the sake of propaganda or merely rhetoric, often with no understanding of architectural issues or the specificity of the history of architecture on this territory.

In the settlement of the question of Gdańsk after the Great War, Britain came out as the power that was the most critical to Polish geopolitical aspirations among the Allies. This led some in Poland to call the British “Prussians on the Thames.”This paper discusses the reasons behind such British “Polono‑skepticism.” After reviewing the common explanations given in the literature, the paper suggests that Britain’s Polish policy at the time was guided by civilisational assumptions and historical considerations which had their roots in the demise of the Lithuanian‑Polish commonwealth in the end of the 18th century.

In 1923, construction of a new Polish seaport began in the small fishermen’s village of Gdynia. By 1926, the village transformed into a port town, and by 1939 it was the biggest and one of the most modern ports on the Baltic Sea, responsible for half of Poland’s foreign exchange. The construction, which was a great investment and considerable strain on the country’s modest resources, was accompanied by intensive enthusiastic propaganda. It was carried out by research institutions (e.g. Baltic Institute) organisations such as Maritime and Colonial League, journalists, writers etc., and it was expressed in exhibitions, public events such as “Holidays of the Sea,”literature, poetry, film and other media. Gdynia became a symbol of Poland’s transformation from nation of farmers to one of seafarers; of modernisation, civilizational development, and even overseas expansion and acquiring colonies. This was summarised with a metaphor of the port being Poland’s “window”or “gateway to the world,”thanks to which it could escape its historically problematic position between Germany and Russia/USSR, and –through a network of trade connections, seafaring, and colonies in Africa and South America –acquire a global presence. This article discusses the rhetoric and realities of Gdynia as the symbol of this ambition in interwar Poland, the contrast and similarities between the image of Gdynia created in contemporary propaganda and publications, and the reality of the actual city.

The author focuses on historical evidence to answer the sociological problem how did the Jewish citizens of the Free City of Danzig, who had lived there for several generations, come to be considered strangers for the Germans ones and were forced to leave their hometown? The method chosen by the author is based on the chronological factor, showing how each subsequent day deprived Jews of the dignity and living space in their own city. The author mentions not only the laws and regulations concerning the Gdańsk Jews as a whole, but wherever possible he refers to the individual fate of a given person or family in order to evoke the terror to those days through the prism of the personal experiences. The author presented the history of Nazi repressions towards the Jewish community in the years 1933–1939 thus exposing the sources of German planned violence hidden by the Nazis under the guise of national propaganda.

Great Britain participated in the decision at the Potsdam Conference to hand over to Poland the territory of the former Free City of Danzig. The area was not recognized as part of Germany by the Great Powers. The aim of the article is to analyze the role that Gdańsk played in British policy towards Poland from the end of the Second World War to the fall of communist rule. It is based on archival research in the National Archives, Kew, supplemented by published British and Polish diplomatic documents, diaries and academic literature on the subject. Based on these sources, the author argues that the importance of the city of Gdańsk in British policy toward the region of East Central Europe diminished during the Cold War in comparison to the city’s role as the Free City of Danzig 1919–1939. However, its place was dynamic as Gdańsk became an important center of protests against the communist authorities in the 1970s and 1980s. The city played a special role since the strikes in August 1980, becoming the center of activity of the Solidarity Trade Union. The culmination of British interest was Margaret Thatcher’s visit to Gdańsk in 1988.

The idea of solidarity returned to post‑war intellectual discourse thanks to the social and trade union movement Solidarity (Solidarność), which was born in Poland in 1980. Its originality lies primarily in the renewal of the ideal of freedom and democracy at the end of the 20th century. To understand the uniqueness of that event, I interpret the turn of the 1970s and 1980s as a new phase in the development of modernity, which is moving into late modernity. It consists of economic fundamentalism with a neo‑liberal market economy (Thatcher, Reagan, Deng Xiaoping), anti‑leftist politics, as well as the return of religion in political life (Ayatollah Khomeini, John Paul II). Solidarity was born as a counterpoint to the first two phenomena, drawing inspiration from leftist traditions and Christian ethics. I then reconstruct the meaning of the idea of solidarity as it took shape in 1980–1981, analysing the notion of emancipatory, agonistic and political solidarity. Interpreting Lech Wałęsa’s Nobel Prize speech and excerpts from the most important programmatic document of the Solidarity movement, the Self‑governing Republic, I reconstruct the notion of political solidarity. Concepts of freedom, equality, dignity, truth and non‑violence allow to reconstruct the core content of the political notion of solidarity. Thus the Solidarity trade union movement is interpreted as the renewal of the Enlightenment promise of freedom –the universal freedom of every citizen.

This article considers analyses of the Russian–Ukrainian war from the perspective of a person living for over a half a year under conditions of Russian invasion in Ukraine. As a result of the Russian invasion of the territory of the independent state of the region, we can predict changes in the geopolitical structure of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as changes in the world order. This conflict is in the heart of Europe –a conflict involving a nuclear power and with the potential to spread to other countries, which risks undermining the entire system of geopolitical control and geopolitical balance, with unpredictable consequences for human rights around the world. Russia’s rejection of the Western‑led “rules‑based order”signals its withdrawal from Europe and its attempted new division of the continent three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall.