Download The Polish Kingdom: a Periphery as a Leader

Jacek Kochanowicz
Warsaw University/Central European University
THE POLISH KINGDOM: A PERIPHERY AS A LEADER
Paper prepared for the XIV International Economic History Congress in Helsinki, Finland,
August 21-25, 2006
Introduction
For a time being—in the last quarter of the 19th century—the Polish Kingdom was one
of the most industrially developed regions of the Russian Empire. This may look somewhat
puzzling, as—intuitively—borderlands, or peripheries of empires may be expected to provide
either a military buffer, or an economically auxiliary role, dependent upon (or exploited by)
the imperial centers. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on this apparent paradox. Its
focus shall be on the second half of the 19th century, when industrialization of the Kingdom
took a really fast pace. But, in order to explain this relatively short period, it is necessary to
put in a longer perspective of Kingdom’s history, and to link it to the political and economic
evolution of the Russian empire.
The Polish scholarly literature on the economic history of the Kingdom, and on its
industrial development and relations with Russia is abundant, but there is very little, if any, of
a recent vintage. Beginnings of interest in the specificity of Kingdom’s economic development started already at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, Rosa Luxemburg stated
in her doctoral dissertation defended in Leipzig (1898) the thesis of the decisive role of the
“eastern markets” for the industrialization of the Kingdom. This thesis, as well as a similar
formulation by Koszutski, who argued that “the industry of the Kingdom uses local labor and
foreign capital to produce for the eastern markets” (1905: 39), became a point of departure
for a very intensive research conducted mostly in the late 1950s and the 1960s. While methodologically it was done within a loose Marxist framework, it kept high standards in terms of
the analysis of primary sources, particularly statistical ones. Works of such authors as Łepkowski (1960), Missalowa (1964-7), Jedlicki (1964), Jezierski (1967, 1984), Kołodziejczyk
(1957) or Ihnatowicz (1956, 1965, 1972) are of particular importance. Apart of monograph
studies of towns, industrial centers, and particular industries, this research—partly challenging
the thesis of Rosa Luxemburg—gave a more nuanced view of the Kingdom’s industrializa-
tion, and its relations with the development of the Russian Empire. Most of this work relies
heavily on statistical sources. It uses methods of descriptive statistics and some simple techniques of time series analysis, without any econometric models. It is, however, very conscious of the quality (often dubious) of the statistical material, as well as ingenious in making
estimates.
This paper—trying to highlight the relation of the Kingdom with the Empire—refers
to this research. The paper consists of four sections. The first one, of a more theoretical character, aims at sketching briefly relations between the concepts of empire, borderlands, and
peripheries. The second looks upon the story of political incorporation of the Kingdom into
the Empire as a necessary context for understanding the workings of the economy. The next
one reconstructs the industrial development of the Kingdom. The fourth section links this issue with the overall development of the Empire.
1. Empires, Peripheries, and Borderlands
The period between 1875 and 1914 is called the Age of Empire (Hobsbawm 1987) and
is characterized by a complex interactions between economic change and political power. The
driving force of economic change in the second half of the nineteenth century were various
technological and institutional innovations, often referred to as the second industrial revolution. Among technological innovations, there was mass production of steel, chemistry, electricity, and transportation. Among the institutional innovations, of particular importance were
join-stock companies and investment banks. As these innovations were based on using—for
the first time of human history—the scientific knowledge in a systematic way, North (1981:
171-186) refers to this period as the second economic revolution, the first one being the
change from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture. These changes, and particularly new
means of transportation (railways, steam ships) and communication (telegraph) contributed to
what is being now called the first globalization (O’Rourke and Williamson 1999). The overall
pace of economic growth increased in Western Europe from annual 1.71 per cent in the years
1820-70 to 2.14 percent between 1870-1913, and in per caputa terms respectively from 1.0 to
1.33 per cent (Madison 2001: 186, 187). Four industrial powers—USA, Germany, Britain,
France—produced 70 per cent of world industrial output on the eve of the First World War
(Lewis 1978).
At the end of the 19th century, there were several empires in a political sense of the
word, i.e. of complex power structures involving people of different ethnic and cultural character: the British, the French, the Dutch, the Chinese, the Russian, the Ottoman, and the Aus2
trian. The first three were the Western colonial empires, of which the leading one was the
British. The remaining four were traditional landed agrarian empires. Two powerful nationstates also tried to join the league of empires, namely Germany and Japan. The United States,
while not an empire in the above sense, pursued a policy of protecting its interests in the
Western hemisphere against other players.
The strengthening of the linkages between economic and political power, particularly
in the British case, led to the emergence of the concept of imperialism, initially treated in a
positive sense as a “white man’s burden” or la mission civilisatrice, later taken over by
Marxists and given a pejorative meaning (Hobsbawm 1987, Wolfe 1997). Imperialism combined economic, political, and ideological motivations. Among the economic, the most important were attempts to control markets and sources of raw materials, indispensable for the
fast rising industrial economies of the core countries. Among the political, the wish to establish one’s own control over transportation routes, sea ports, military bases and possible colonies before the competing powers would be able to do so. Finally, ideology and religion mattered. Europeans though of themselves as a superior “white race,” whose mission was to
spread Western civilization and Christian religion to other parts of the world.
Whether imperialism and colonialism “paid” for the Western core countries in a
strictly economic sense—as the Marxist argued, stressing the exploitation of colonial people—is a matter of a debate among the economic historians. Some argue, as Kennedy (1987)
for instance, that running empires involved huge costs in terms of sustaining necessary armies
and navies, and that some empires “overestreched” themselves, which eventually led to their
demise.
A word of clarification is necessary as to the concepts of “borderlands” and “peripheries.” Borderland is a term denoting usually the most outward territory of the empire, be it
landed or colonial, often of a shifting and contested nature, as for example territories claimed
both by the Austrian and the Ottoman empire. The conflict over Fashoda between the British
and the French is an example of such a clash between colonial empires. Periphery is nowadays most often in a sense close to the world-system theory, i.e. as a part of the world-wide
division of labor, but may also be used in a everyday language sense of an opposition to the
metropolis. Sometimes, the function of a given territory as borderland and periphery may
overlap. It is perhaps proper to make a few more remarks about the ideal types of empires and
on the economic and political functions of borderlands and peripheries in various types of
empires.
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1. Traditional agrarian landed empires. China, Rome, or Byzantium are prime examples. The bulk of the population in such an empire is peasantry. The political center imposes
its rule over the whole area, and—economically—is focused mostly on taxation, as the revenues raised this way support the bureaucracy and the army. Craftsmen, traders and moneylenders play a role subordinated to this system, serving the needs of the military and the bureaucracy. Borders are shifting (expanding or contracting), the borderlands serve as a military
buffer zone where army garrisons are stationed, supported by taxation. Usually, a specialized
economic sector develops around them. Independently of the official metropolis policies, the
members of state bureaucracy treat the borderland as a source of private enrichment.
2. Traditional colonial empires. The most important cases were the Spanish and the
Portuguese empires. Colonies (peripheries, borderlands) serve, in this model, as a source of
specific—mineral or agricultural—goods, unavailable in the metropolis. Such empires are run
in a redistributive way, similar to the former case, with revenues divided between the local
governors, the planter class, and the Crown.
3. Commercial colonial empires. The British Empire and the Dutch Empire are the
best known cases. In the economy of such an empire, imports of goods unavailable in the center is also of crucial importance, but the main agent is the commercial class, a product of early
capitalism. Taxation is important, but—apart of financing the State—it also serves as a tool
to motivate the inhabitants of the peripheries to structure the output towards the production of
goods in demand in the metropolis.
4. Empires of the era of imperialism. Their emergence is a product of the second industrial revolution, and they evolve from the previous model in times of the rapid rise of demand for the raw materials for the manufacturing industries. Increasingly, the peripheries
serve as markets for goods produced in the metropolis and as investment opportunities. The
are run by a close-knit of interests of capitalist class and the modern state, as mentioned
above.
The three empires which ruled over Eastern Europe in the 19th century were, at least
initially, most close to the first model, that of the traditional agrarian empire. At the end of the
century, they started to acquire some characteristics of the last model, because they had to
compete politically and militarily with other powers, because they increasingly wanted to imitate the leading powers, because part of their public was seeing some mission for their country
to play, and because they became involved in the workings of the modern, globalizing world
economy. This was also a case with the Russian empire. “Modern Russian imperialism was
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no more or less particularist than that of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, or
Japan” (Rieber 1994: 322)
Eastern and Central Europe development must thus be regarded with reference to these
interrelated tendencies of economic and political nature. Eastern and Central Europe (and the
Polish lands in particular) were peripheral in a double sense. First, they were on the periphery
of the world economy, in a sense of world-system theory. Second, they were peripheral in a
political sense of their relation to the power center. Thus, an explanation of economic processes in these lands has to refer to (a) their economic relations with the world economy, (b)
their political relation to the empire they were attached to, and (c) their economic relation
with other lands of this empire.
Overall, the pace of development of Central and Eastern Europe in the second half of
the 19th century increased, but also did its lag behind the Western part of the continent (Janos
2000: 130). To a large extent, the processes in the second half of the 19th century were caused
by the industrial “pull” of Western Europe—the needs of the industrialized countries for raw
materials, which Eastern and Central Europe could satisfy now due to the extending railway
network (Berend and Ránky 1982: 21-7). But these lands also underwent a process of industrialization themselves, although it was much weaker than in the West. While one sweeping
explanation is impossible, it is important to stress that an important role in this process was
played by foreigners, who were bringing business and technological know-how and facilitated
the diffusion of the technological and institutional innovations, and of foreign capital (Berend
2003: 142-57).
But, at the same time, these countries were dependent upon policies and economic developments in their respective empires. In particular, the economic development of the relatively backward Eastern European empires can not be simply interpreted in terms of either
spontaneous (market driven) diffusion of innovations from the West, or their peripheral place
in the capitalist world-system—precisely because they often pursued policies aimed at changing their place in this system, as was the case of Russia when it pursued the active, statist industrialization policies in the 1890s, which might have provided more favorable conditions
for the local business than would be a case if a laissez faire policies were being pursued (von
Laue 1963). Also, political and military circumstances mattered. For instance, when railways
developed quickly in Russia proper, for security reasons it discriminate against constructing
them in the industrially most developed western parts of the Polish Kingdom, because they
were located west of the Vistula river and were considered as a help in a possible western
invasion (Dobroński 1981).
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2. Political Incorporation
Since the end of the 17th century, the Russian empire was expanding to the east, to the
south and to the west. In the west, the area of this expansion was the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. This state formation—territorially, one of the biggest in Europe (900
thousand sq. kilometers at the end of the 17th century) was, quite contrary to Russia, contracting. The economies of those two state formations did not differ much in the 18th century, as
both were predominantly agrarian, although the Polish Crown lands (Poland proper) were
more urbanized and densely populated as either the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the other part
of the Commonwealth) or Russia. Thus, it was not the difference in economic performance,
but in the way political and military power were structured that explains the Russia’s expansion and Poland’s contraction.
Poland—contrary to its neighbors—had never developed absolutism, in a sense of a
concentration of powers in the hands of the monarch, the court, and the royal bureaucracy, at
the expense of the power of the nobility (Anderson 1979). Quite the contrary, until almost the
end of the 18th century it remained a sort of a medieval Ständestaat: a monarch (often a foreigner) was elected by the nobility, most of the formal power lay in the hands of Sejm (the
lower chamber of parliament) and in the hands of the local councils of nobility, while the real
power was in the hands of the magnates—wealthy nobles owing tens of towns, hundreds of
villages, and thousands of serfs, usually also members of the Senate and holding most important offices of the State. Kings were often almost pawns in their hands. There was little taxation (State revenues were from the royal domain) and a very small standing army. The ideological justification was that a weak monarchy guarantees the “golden freedom” of the Polish
nobility, while at the same time a weak Poland poses no threat to its neighbors and thus is
safe.
The Polish state was an empire of sorts. Its eastward expansion started in the 15th century with a personal union between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and—
politically—culminated with the Union of Lublin in 1569. The socio-political mechanism of
the Polish expansion included huge grants of land for the Polish aristocracy and concomitant
inflow of the Polish settlers, the polonization of the Lithuania aristocracy, some (limited and
resisted) conversion of local population into Catholicism, and substantial migration of Jews
into these territories. As the Polish state was weak, the main agents of expansion was the aristocracy.
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While Poland remained a weak state in the 18th century, the neighboring countries—
Austria, Prussia and Russia—were developing a different system of government, much more
centralized, bureaucratic, and tailored for supporting the war machinery. Russia—particularly
since Peter the Great—became active in expanding its borders towards open sea ports in the
Baltic and in the Black Sea, in wars with Sweden and the Ottoman Empire. The Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania was no match for the bureaucratic-military empires, and the
partitions of the 1772, 1793 and 1795 (motivated also by Catherine the Great fear of the
French Revolution and her willingness to crush the Polish “Jacobins”), led to its disappearance, and dismemberment between Russia, Austria and Prussia. While the driving forces of
the Russian Empire expansion are beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth to notice that—
until the Crimean war at least—Russia was scoring considerable successes in this expansion
despite its economic backwardness and the limited modernization of its armed forces. The
importance of the Polish lands in the process of this expansion is evident—they lay between
Russia and, in the 18th and 19th century, the most advanced (economically and military) part
of the world, the western Europe.
During partitions of the end of the 18th century, the territories of the Duchy of Lithuania were taken by Russia. After the Napoleonic wars, the same fate fell upon part of the heartland of Poland proper. Congress of Vienna led, in 1815, to the creation—mainly out of the
territories of pro-Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw (1807-1815)—of the Polish Kingdom, a state
formation of approximately 128 thousand sq. kilometers and 3.3 m population. While Kresy
(frontier lands), as the former Polish eastern territories were called, were ethnically and religiously mixed (Polish manors, local peasantry, towns partly Polish and partly Jewish), the
Kingdom was ethnically predominantly Polish, the denomination of the majority of its inhabitants was Roman Catholic, and it was more urbanized and economically developed than the
Kresy. It was to became a heartland of Polish national consciousness formation and of Polish
nationalism. Thus, the most Western-located borderland of the Russian Empire was country
of a population of relative ethnic (Polish) homogeneity, westernized both because of the longterm effects of the Roman Catholic Religion and because of the French influence dating from
the Napoleonic period, and developing strong nationalist and anti-Russian ideologies and sentiments. The nationalist sentiments resulted in two insurrections against Russia, in 1830 and
1863.
The process of incorporation of the Kingdom into the Empire was gradual. In 1815, it
got a far-reaching autonomy: language, constitution (which allowed for political pluralism),
territorial administration based upon the French (departmental) model, a separate army, a
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monetary system, a fiscal administration. United with Russia through a person of the monarch, it kept almost total independence except of foreign policy. This autonomy was drastically reduced after each of the two insurrections. The first one was a regular war between the
Russian and the Kingdom’s armies, which the Kingdom finally lost at the end of 1831. The
second was of a different kind: the insurrectionists, capitalizing upon difficult situation of the
Tsarist regime after Sevastopol, set up a wide network of clandestine organizations topped
with the National Government, and waged a long, protracted guerilla campaign (in the Kingdom proper and in Kresy), finally crushed by the Russians in the mid-1864.
After 1831 Constitution was revoked and replaced by the Organic Statute, the separate
army abolished and large Russian garrisons introduced instead, the martial law and a repressive police system were also introduced. The administration became gradually subjected to
the imperial rule, departments were changed in 1837 into gubernyas, the Russian monetary
units were introduced in 1847, the Russian criminal code in 1847, and the Russian metric system in 1849.
The remnants of Kingdom’s distinctiveness were liquidated after the 1863 uprising.
While the peasantry gained land due to enfranchisement reform of 1864, those who participated in the uprising were heavily punished by executions (around 700), exile to Siberia
(close to 40 thousands) and confiscation of property. This affected particularly the landed
nobility, who were most active in the uprising. Russian language was introduced into the administrative and educational systems together with a large influx of Russian officials.
The Russian domination had never been fully accepted by the politically active segments of the Polish society. Secret political organizations prepared the uprising of 1863. Afterwards, however, the revolutionary spirit subsided and the secret political activity had been
replaced by the so-called organic work, which—thorough legal means, but also clandestine
educational activities—attempted to improve social relations and to strengthen culture in its
various dimensions. Since the last decades of the 19th century, the modern political movements developed, of which one of the most important was the National Democracy, the aim of
which was to strengthen the national identity and to gain a degree of autonomy within the
Russian Empire.
3. Industrialization
In the early phases of Kingdom’s history, imperial domination had only a limited and
partial influence on its economic development because of its autonomy. In 1832 the Russian
government introduced even a custom tariff on its border with the Kingdom. However, a brief
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survey of this development is necessary, as it laid the foundation for the Kingdom’s relatively
strong industrial position in the second half of the century.
After 1815, the Kingdom was devastated by wars and financially strained by foreign
debts, mainly to France, which the Holy Alliance winners took over. Agriculture was in particularly painful situation, as export prices were low due to the British Corn Laws, the large
estates technologically backward, and peasantry (who got personal freedom, but not rights to
the land, in 1807) burdened by land hunger, by the labor duties owned to the landlords
(changed into rent in money in the early sixties), and by high taxation. At the same time, the
Duchy left a certain legacy of capitalist development, as during this period a class of bold
entrepreneurs started to emerge mostly out of the ranks of army contractors.
Much of the change of the period 1815 to 1830 was due to the aggressive, highly statist modernization program of Prince Xawery Drucki-Lubecki, who first negotiated the
Duchy’s debts at the Congress of Vienna and then served as the Kingdom’s Minister of
Treasure. His aim was to strengthen the economy in order to maintain a relative independence
from Russia. He promoted institutional reforms by establishing a national bank and land
credit, thus attempting to give the country a sound monetary system and the landed classes a
possibility to modernize.
Moreover, Lubecki initiated industrialization by promoting the development of heavy
(metallurgical) industry and the textile industry. The results of the first venture were somewhat doubtful—technologically backward plants, subsidized by the state, were loss makers,
while the profits were made mostly by the entrepreneurs who managed to get state contracts
(Kowalska, Jedlicki and Jezierski 1958, Jedlicki 1964). The Łódź case was more successful—state subsidies and tariff barriers with the West lured many weavers from the German
lands to come to the Kingdom, which led to the establishment of then still quite primitive industry which, however, in the second half of the century became one of the largest European
textile centers (Missalowa 1964-67). This is witnessed by the demographic change—the
population of Łódź increased from less than a thousand in 1820 to 15 thousand in 1850, 350
thousand in 1900, and over half a million in 1913 (Ihnatowicz 1981: 454).
While the modern manufacturing industry emerged in the Kingdom in the 1840s (textiles, heavy industry, some machine making), the period of a really fast development starts in
the late the 1860s, with another jump in the 1890s (Table 1).1 The spread of industrialization
1
Table 1 gives a general overview of industrial development, but it is important to note that any kind of aggregate statistics is based on estimates, as the basic data is incomplete.
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was, not surprisingly, spatially uneven. The most visible it was in three centers—in the Warsaw industrial region, the Łódź industrial region, and in the Dąbrowa Basin.
Warsaw industrial region was the biggest in the Kingdom (Łepkowski 1960, Misztal
1962). Its early development, related to the capital role of Warsaw in the Commonwealth of
Poland and Lithuania, and somehow also boosted by the efforts of Kingdom’s government in
the 1820s, was suppressed due to the political effects of the 1831 uprising. The second half of
the century, and particularly its last quarter speeded up the industrial development. Once the
Warsaw-Vienna railway was completed and other railways developed, Warsaw became the
biggest junction, linked also with the Dąbrowa Basin region of heavy industry. In contrast to
two other regions, the industries here were diversified, although a leading role was played by
various metal industries (tools and machines production, among others), also electrical industries were of importance. There were several smaller cities in the region apart of Warsaw,
which played a leading role, with population rising from 250 thousands in 1866 to 900 thousands in 1914.
The early beginnings of the Łódź region were laid by a massive influx of weavers
from Prussia, bankrupted at home by the loss of Polish markets after partitions. They started
with domestic production of wool and linen textiles, later replaced with manufacture technology due to support of the State and some landowners. In the 1830s, some manufacturers
moved to cotton and also were introducing mechanization, the output of cotton rose quickly in
the second half of the century (Table 2). Technological conversion (mechanization of spinning and weaving, introduction of steam power) took pace in the 1870s, and a number of large
factories had been established (Ihnatowicz 1963, Łukasiewicz 1963). At this stage, a considerable role had been played by foreign capital. But the textile industry remained diversified,
and modern factories, employing large number of workers, were accompanied by small-scale
firms, often relying on the putting-out system, with little attention paid to the conditions of
labor employed.
Beginnings of the Dąbrowa Basin are related to the discovery of coal deposits at the
end of the 18th century. Zinc smelting started to develop on this basis, also the government of
the Polish Kingdom established a number of metalworks, but the locally available coal proved
to be inadequate for ironworks. The demand for coal was boosted by the construction of Warsaw-Vienna railway in 1845-48, and ongoing development of railway network. In the 1870s
the state ironworks were privatized. Since the second half of this decade, industrial development speeded up, statistically witnessed by a jump of coal production from 0.2 m tons in 1872
to 1.4 in 1882 and 2.9 in 1892, as well as by the increase of pig iron output from 0.7 thou10
sands ton in 1878 to 11.1 in 1880 and 74.0 thousands ton in 1890 (Kaczyńska 1981). This
increase of production was accompanied by the establishment of several large join stock companies with German and French capital. Also, the industries diversified and apart of finished
goods they were also producing intermediate and capital goods. Parallel to the metal sector,
also other industries developed, chemical in particular.
The fast pace of industrialization was accompanied by demographic and social change
more rapid than before. There was a visible speeding up of the population growth (Table 3).
The increase of population per decade is two to three time faster in the second than in the first
half of the century. Discussion of reasons of the faster increase of population in the second
half of the century is beyond the scope of this paper, only two brief points may be made on
this issue. First, it was a result of the changes in the agricultural sector of economy (emancipation of peasantry, prices much better than before the corn laws were repelled in 1949, and
some technological progress reaching also the peasantry) than in the industrial sector. Second,
it affected the industrial development through an easy availability of cheap labor. Not only the
population increase witness to modernization, also apparently the standards of living had risen
to some degree, at least in the cities, as witnessed by the increase of the average consumption
(Table 4).
In the industrial regions, the social structure increasingly acquired a more capitalist,
class-like character. The working classes were recruited, to a large degree, from the ranks of
the peasantry, migrating to the cities from the overpopulated countryside. For the middle
classes and the bourgeoisie, of interest is their ethnic composition. The share of non-ethnic
Poles—the Jews and the Germans, but also some other groups—was very high, particularly in
Łódź (Kołodziejczyk 1957: 114-207, Ihnatowicz 1972: 187-204). Germans were migrating
from Prussia and also from more far-away located places since the first half of the 19th century, bringing with themselves some capital, but also—what seems to be of particular importance—technical skills, managerial know-how, and market connections, and they were decisive in establishing the early basis of the textile industry. Jews profited from the on-going
process emancipation, which started in the Napoleonic period (Eisenbach 1988). In the second
half of the century, increasing numbers were migrating to the Kingdom from the former Polish eastern territories and from Russia, since the imperial government introduced discriminatory measures against the Jews in the central Russian lands. Jewish entrepreneurs were active
both in the very small business (shops, wholesale trade, etc.), as well as in establishing the
large industrial plants. The German and Jewish entrepreneurs served, thus, the role of “essential outsiders,” possessing human and social capital which the ethnic Poles had, apparently, in
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short supply.2 While these entrepreneurs contributed to the economic development of the
Kingdom, their “otherness” led to the rise of anti-Semitism.
4. The Kingdom and the Empire
How the processes in the Polish Kingdom fits the broader picture of the economic development of the Russian Empire? The process of Russia’s industrialization had a relatively
fast pace in the second half of the 19th century, with the average annual rate of growth of industrial output of 5 per cent in the period of 1860-1913, reaching 7.5 per cent during the nineties It put Russia, despite its relative backwardness and low level of GDP per capita, at the
position of the fifth industrial producer in the world, after USA, Great Britain, Germany, and
France (Grossman 1973). In the sixties and early seventies, the industrialization of Russia
proceeded in the conditions of liberal economic policies, and its main stimulus was internal
demand, related to the fast rise of population. Since the mid-seventies, the government started
to rise tariffs, mainly for fiscal reasons, but that resulted in more favorable conditions for the
Russian producers of manufactured goods. In the nineties, state became actively involved in
industrialization, forcing accumulation through aggressive taxation, attracting foreign direct
investment, and rising foreign loans (von Laue 1963). While the earlier phases of economic
development largely resulted in the rise of industries producing consumer products, the nineties brought about fast development of industries producing capital goods.
The Polish Kingdom, even when outpaced by other regions of the Empire, retained on
the eve of the First World War a relatively high second place among the Empire’s industrial
regions, after Moscow’s, and before St. Petersburg region (Table 5). As summarized in the
preceding section, its industrial development—and particularly the technological change—
started relatively early, which might have given it certain advantage over the industrial region
of the Russia proper. In the literature, several factors are mentioned as explaining the fast
economic change occurring in the second half of the century: the economic results of the
enfranchisement of peasantry, the solid foundations laid down by the earlier development, the
ability of the Kingdom to take advantage of technological and institutional innovations of the
day, and—last but not least—the role of the Russian markets, on which the Kingdom had a
certain competitive edge.
The peasants in this part of Poland got personal freedom already in 1807, due to the
Constitution given by Napoleon to the Duchy of Warsaw, but their rights to the land were not
2
The term comes from Chirot (1997).
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secure. They had to perform labor duties and could easily be evicted from land on the landlord’s will (that was restricted in 1846). In addition, the overall situation of agriculture was
difficult because of low prices, as long as the British corn laws were in operation (until 1849).
In 1864 the peasants were given full property rights to their plots. Rents were abolished, although taxes raised in order to allow the State to compensate the landowners. The enfranchisement was relatively favorable for peasantry, if compared either with the Prussian and
Austrian reforms of the first half of the 19th century, or the Russian reform of 1861. Not surprisingly—the motives were predominantly political. The reform was an answer to a manifest
of the insurrectionist National Government (January 1863) granting peasants full rights to the
land. The Russian government wanted to neutralize peasantry by all means, and to punish the
rebellious landed gentry as well. For the peasantry, the enfranchisement—together with better
market conditions and some technological progress in the agriculture—led to the improvement of their economic situation, and to the rise of their demand for industrial products, particularly textiles. In the years 1864-68 the local producers of cotton textiles could not meet the
demand and imports ere rising faster than the local output (Ihnatowicz 1956; 1965: 19).
The enfranchisement also changed the economics of the landed estates. The landed
gentry, devoid of free labor, were turning to hired labor. Due to demographic growth, there
was enough landless peasantry to supply labor. Landed estates, keen on economizing costs,
were improving and investing, which led to raising demand for agricultural machinery, fertilizers, etc. To a smaller degree, a similar process started with the peasantry, having now secure
rights in land.
The second factor mentioned were foundations of industrial development, laid down in
the first half of the century. As mentioned in the first part of the preceding sections, all three
most important industrial regions of the Kingdom—Warsaw, Łódź and Dąbrowa Basin—went
through a process of industrial development already in the first half of the century, what—in
particular—led to the rise of entrepreneurial class. Also, infrastructure developed, with the
beginnings of the railway construction. Thus, there were actors and conditions to respond
once the local demand, and the demand of the Russian Empire at large, started to rise.
The third factor is the technological and institutional innovation. As Łukasiewicz finds
in his detailed study of the technological change in the industries of the Kingdom of Poland,
[o]nly the faster pace of technological breakthrough and [...] its earlier completion
could win for the industries of either the Kingdom or the Empire the vast markets of
the Empire of the Tsars. The Kingdom won this race (Łukasiewicz 1963: 308).
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In textiles, the process consisted on mechanization of spinning and weaving, as well as introduction of mechanical power. In metal and machine making industries, on the introduction of
large scale, mechanized factories. In ferrous metallurgy, on the replacement of charcoal by
mineral fuels. The process of technological change, already advanced in the years 1855–1864,
was completed in 1865-79 in textiles and metal and machine making industries, and in metallurgy in mid-eighties (Łukasiewicz 1963). Technological change was paralleled by the institutional change, characteristic for the second industrial revolution. As size of the plant and necessary investment increased, enterprises were taking form of joint stock companies. Also,
banks were established in Warsaw and in Łódź, the most important among them being Bank
Handlowy in Warsaw (1870, the biggest financial institution in the Kingdom), Bank Dyskontowy (1871), Bank Handlowy in Łódź (1872), also Bank Kupiecki in Łódź. Besides, there
were branches of Russian banks, as well as number of smaller banking houses.
Last but not least, of enormous importance were the relations with the Russian Empire. The Kingdom’s nascent industries had access to Russian market since 1815 until a custom border had been established in 1832, after the November uprising. In 1851, the Kingdom
was again incorporated into the Russian custom area, then Łódź became a competition for
Moscow textile industries. When in 1877, the Russian Empire, introducing tariffs in gold, and
than rising tariffs in 1881, 1885 and 1890 turned into protectionist policies (mainly against
the German imports), the already well-developed Kingdom’s firms could easily take advantage of it, and exports to Russia started to rise quickly (Table 6). While until the 1870s the
domestic market was a driving force of industrial development, since then the Kingdom was
increasingly producing for the Russian markets (Ihnatowicz 1956). An important part of these
exports were textiles, in which the Łódź industrialist were capable of being competitive in the
Russian markets, as the steady rise of exports to Russia shows (Table 7). The Kingdom’s
competition threatened interests of Moscow industrialists, they lobbied for the government aid
(Luxemburg 1898, Jezierski 1967: 173-6). As a result, it tended to disfavor the Polish Kingdom producers by means of tax policies and railway tariffs. Thus, while between the emancipation of the peasantry and the mid-1870s the main stimulus for the industrial development
was the local market of the Kingdom, later it proceeded mostly due to the market pull of the
Russian Empire.
The most comprehensive statistical and economic analysis of the external economic
relations of the Kingdom was provided by Jezierski (1967). According to his findings, during
the second half of the 19th century the external trade of the Kingdom reoriented from West to
East (Russia), while the structure of exports changed from raw materials to manufactured
14
products. The rise of the overall volume of trade was particularly fast between 1850 and 1870,
to decline somewhat in the 1870s. The 1880 was a turning point—since this year, until 1900,
the volume of trade with Russia was rising very fast, while that with the West declined. In the
first decade of the 20th century there was a reversal—the rate of growth of trade with the West
was now higher than with the West. In the structure of the Kingdom exports to Russia, manufactured goods dominated, while in the imports—raw materials. Thus, simplifying a bit,
Kingdom’s place of in the Empire economy was that of processing of raw materials for the
Russian markets. Of particular importance were the last two decades of the 19th century, the
peak of success of Kingdom’s exports to the Empire. Once the Russian industrialization matured, the Kingdom lost it comparative advantage.
Concluding Remarks
For Russia, the reasons for keeping the Polish Kingdom within the Empire were predominantly political and military, as its territory was the main communication route to the
West, and a possible springboard of Western invasion. This was not easy because of the rising
Polish nationalism, witnessed by two armed insurrections. As a reaction, the over the 19th
century the autonomy of Poles was gradually reduced and finally abolished, and the imperial
rule strengthened and consolidated. Among the Polish elite, after the failed 1863 uprising, the
romantic dreams about regaining independence being buried, the ideological climate in the
Kingdom was also favorable towards economic development, as revolutionary sentiments lost
popularity leaving space for “organic work,” of which economic development—together with
education—was an important part. Also, many ambitious Poles were making careers in Russia
proper as businessmen and industrialists (Szwarc 1995).
The Kingdom’s industrial leap forward started after 1864 (the emancipation of peasantry) and the Kingdom was a bit ahead of Russia proper in the process of industrialization.
The relatively fast growth of Kingdom’s industrial economy was a coincidence of several
factors: the foundations laid down during the early industrial phase of the first half of the century, the diffusion of innovations of the second industrial revolution, the availability of entrepreneurial talent and of capital (both, often, of foreign origin), the emancipation of peasantry,
and—last but not least—the availability of huge markets of economically underdeveloped
Russia, whose own manufacturing industries could have been outcompeted for a time. This
process of industrialization was spontaneous in a sense that it was not triggered by any conscious state policy, as was the case with the Kingdom half-a-century earlier, with Russia under de Witte, or with Japan after the Meiji restoration. The industrial boom was an outcome of
15
the activity of private business without any direct state help. At the same time, it was dependent upon the Russian state in an unintended way because of the relatively favorable emancipation of peasantry, and because of Russian tariff policies since the late 1870s. Taking advantage of its initial comparative advantage, the Kingdom could remain in a leading position
among the industrial regions of the Empire for a while, but this position was eclipsed with
Russia’s fast industrialization of the 1990s.
Despite its successes, the industrialization—and the overall modernization of the
Kingdom—was not without the drawbacks. First, it was one-sided and partial, as it profited
the peasantry only marginally, and it was territorially uneven. Second, it was overly dependent upon Russia—Kingdom’s industries could so easily develop only as long as they had easy
access to the Russian markets and were protected there against western competition. The
paradox of the Polish history of that time was that the Polish national aspiration went against
the economic interests.
At the end, it seems worthwhile to make a few observations putting the processes of
the second half of the nineteenth century in a longer perspective, particularly in relation to the
subsequent de-linking and re-linking the economic processes in Poland from and to those in
Russia and the Soviet Union. Poland gained its independence in 1918, but the interwar period
was not particularly good for industrialization. All over the world, and particularly in Europe,
it was a epoch of dirigisme, authoritarian regimes and economic nationalism. The industrial
output of the Polish lands declined dramatically due to the war, and managed to regain its
1913 levels only on the eve of the Second World War. Among many reasons for this decline,
was the loss of the Russian markets, due to which the Kingdom developed so quickly during
the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. As a result of the Second World War, Poland
became once again incorporated into the Russian (Soviet) “empire.” Once again, the reasons
were mainly political, not economic—Soviet Union extending its buffer zone between itself
and the West. Poland industrialized quickly and intensively, although this time not according
to laissez-faire principles. Once again, the “Russian market” became important for the Polish
consumer products, among them the Łódź textiles. The end of state socialism, and the loss of
Russian demand was among the reasons of deep downturn of the industrial output in the early
nineties. The story of the following economic revival is another matter.
16
Tables
Table 1
Industrial output in the Polish Kingdom
(million of rubles)
Year
Industrial output
1840
8,4
1850
11,3
1864
40,5
1870
122,7
1880
171,0
1890
216,0
1900
600,0
1910
860,0
Source: Jezierski (1984), p. 238
Table 2
Output of cotton in the Polish Kingdom
(million of rubles)
Year
Output
1854
2 730
1860
8 091
1865
5 010
1871
10 433
1875
12 006
1879
33 237
1885
42 062
Source: Łukasiewicz (1963), p. 111,
180, 325.
Table 3
Population of the Polish Kingdom (thousands)
Year
Population
Previous year =100
1820
3 520
1830
3 998
113,6
1840
4 488
112,3
1850
4 811
107,2
1860
4 840
100,6
1870
6 079
125,6
1880
7 105
116,9
1890
8 258
116,2
1900
10 000
121,1
1910
12 129
121,3
Source: Gieysztorowa (1981), p. 434.
17
Per 1 sq.
km.
27
31
35
37
38
47
55
64
78
94
Table 4
Average consumption in the Polish Kingdom (kg)
Year
Grains
Potatoes
1810
143
36
1822-1829
147
74
1841-1850
121
150
1851-1860
149
157
1861-1870
222
234
1871-1880
n.a.
317
1881-1890
203
357
1891-1900
222
405
1901-1910
229
431
Source: GUS (2003), table 61 (213).
Table 5
Value of output of the main industrial regions
of Russian Empire (1898, million of rubles)
Region
Output
Moscow
755,1
The Polish Kingdom
335,5
St. Petersburg
316,7
Donetsk
246,1
South-Western
135,1
Ural
85,3
Baku
82
Transcaucasian
n.a.
Source: Laszczenko (1956), p. 159-60.
Table 6
Net exports of fabrics from the Polish Kingdom
(million of rubles)
Year Exports
Year
Exports
1879
9,3
1895
94,8
1880
15,6
1899
124,4
1884
51,8
1900
175,2
1885
54,1
1901
171,7
1886
76,9
1905
152,5
1891
92,9
1909
185,7
1893
103,4
1910
214,7
1894
122,9
1911
228,0
Source: Jezierski (1984), p. 137.
18
Table 7
Kingdom of Poland exports to Russia
(million or rubles)
Year
1840
1850
1864
1870
1880
1890
1900
1910
Source: Jezierski (1984), p. 238.
19
Exports
1,0
1,0
11,5
25,0
47,0
194,0
395,0
515,0
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