Poland: Forging an Empire from 1648

In 1648, God turned his back on Poland. The old king died, a Cossack rebellion swept Ukraine, the Swedes were sharpening their knives, and the Tsar in Moscow was eyeing. In Warsaw, the greedy nobles are still complacent about the "free veto" and are ready to push the country into the abyss. On the eve of the impending flood, the soul of a military engineer from later generations awakened in the body of the newly elected king, Jan Kazimierz Vasa. He doesn't need God's mercy, he only needs three things: a standardized assembly line, a bayonet phalanx of absolute obedience, and the iron-blooded kingship. "I only come here to do three things: do industry! Do industry! Do industry!" From the steel-making furnaces on the banks of the Vistula to the burning Red Square in Moscow; from the Armada in the Baltic Sea to the dismembered Prussia. This is a story of a hand-made industrial revolution, crushing old Europe with a torrent of steel, and establishing a Polish empire on which the sun never sets. "Prussia? That's just my province. Russia? That's just my hunting ground."