The aim of this paper is to partially capture the state of theoretical debate amongst Polish historians on their own discipline in the second half of 20th century. To achieve this we analyse the content of the first twenty five volumes of journal Historyka published in the period when Celina Bobińska was its editor-in-chief (1967–1995). We assume that Historyka – the only journal dedicated to the theory of history and history of historiography – was situated in the centre of exchanges on academic historical practices. We do not treat its content as a reflection of contemporary studies in the theory of history, but as a dominant position in the self-understanding of the discipline competing with other utterances. The paper is a reconstruction of this offer, which is composed of the definitions of subjects of historical studies, descriptions of productive methods, hierarchy of masters of historical writings and their influential books.

The article describes features of Jerzy Topolski’s narrative in economic history. It focuses on four important threads and moments in his research on this field: great manor property, estimation of national income in the history of Poland, the birth of capitalism in Europe, social dependencies in the manor economy system.