[Warfare, loyalty, and rebellion: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Great Northern War, 1709-1717. Mindaugas Šapoka] : recenzija

ENThe monograph by Mindaugas Šapoka about the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) during the years of the Great Northern War, published in 2018 by Routledge, is an excellent addition to research on this topic. Even though the monograph echoes the author’s doctoral thesis defended at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, in 2014, in this case, his research is somewhat different in nature, and the monograph is a more conceptual work. Until now, the socio-political and socio-economic contexts of the Great Northern War were generally given less attention in studies of the internal and foreign policies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in this period, and in research on warfare. In the historiographical contexts of grand policy and distinctive war campaigns, the accentuation of the specific situation the GDL found itself in has often ‘fallen by the wayside’. A certain exception, in a good sense, would be the research conducted by Robert Frost, which the author of the monograph under review appears to extend, by focusing his research exclusively on the GDL. This is an important point, because not so long ago in Lithuania, when presenting historiography on the Great Northern War, specialists in the history of warfare described this period in the 18th-century context as one of the least studied. [...]. [Extract, p. 228-229]