PhD thesis defence by Jan J. Blonski
This thesis examines taverns in the early modern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth as infrastructural and symbolic sites where execution of power, economy, and subaltern agency intersected. It argues that drinking houses were not peripheral spaces of sociability but central institutions within the manorial-corvée system, through which lords extracted labour, enforced dependency, and mediated everyday life. The study reconstructs taverns as nodes of the propination monopoly – a system that bound peasants to purchase their landlord’s alcohol and thus transformed intoxication into a mechanism of governance. At the same time, by analysing legal regulations, estate inventories, contracts, censuses, and criminal records, it uncovers how these spaces enabled gestures of negotiation, refusal, and solidarity that escaped formal record.
The thesis intervenes in three historiographical debates: it situates the Commonwealth within global histories of early modern capitalism and coercion, focusing on how Central and Eastern Europe was constructed both in the early modern period and later in historiography; it challenges the hypothesis about the nobility forcing peasants to drink, and reinterprets Jewish tavern keeping through the lens of legal status rather than ethnicity or religion.
Methodologically, it advances a hauntological and subaltern approach to early modern social history, treating archival silence not as absence but as trace – evidence of both domination and resistance. Drawing together microhistorical case studies and global economic perspectives, Unholy Spirits reimagines the tavern as a site where early modern subjects drank, labored, and contested their place in a world governed through spirits in every sense of the word.
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