This is an account of the evolution of Poland from conditions of subjection to its reconstruction in 1918, development in the years between the two World Wars, and reorganisation after 1945. It begins at a time when Poland was still suffering from the legacy of the eighteenth-century Partitions and burdened with problems of sizeable ethnic minorities, inadequate agrarian reforms and sluggish industrial development sustained by foreign capital. It traces the history through to independence and then to the transformation of the country in the last thirty years. Although many of the problems of...