5
FABRYKA:
The Process of Industrialization
Until the middle decades of the twentieth century, no part of Eastern Europe
could claim that Industry played a dominant role in economic or social life. In
contrast to the countries of Western Europe, where the primary Industrial
Revolution was often completed over one hundred years earlier, industrializa-
tion in the east was frequently postponed and frequently interrupted. In the
Polish lands, where the first precocious factories appeared in the 1740s, it has
proceeded intermittently over the last two centuries.
Any attempt to squeeze the history of Polish industrialization into a tidy theo-
retical model soon runs into serious difficulties. But that does not deter the theo-
reticians. In present-day Polish scholarship, three stages are usually distinguished.
The earliest stage, from the 1740s to 1815, was characterized by the small-scale,
local ventures undertaken mainly by feudal magnates for the improvement of
their private estates. No fundamental economic change was involved, but
advances in technology, science, trade, finance, and the organization of labour
laid foundations for the future. The early factories represent a link between tra-
ditional craft and cottage activities, and later forms of mass production. The next
stage, which began in 1815 and lasted until the Second World War, is referred to
as Poland's 'First Industrialization'. In so far as its effects were incomplete, it is
not deemed to qualify for the title of an industrial 'Revolution'. (Modern Polish
historians prefer the term przewrot (changeover) to that of rewolucja (revolu-
tion)). The latest stage, since 1945, which coincides with the 'Second
Industrialization'undertaken by the People's Republic, is still in progress.^1
The focus of the First Industrialization was undoubtedly to be found in the
Congress Kingdom. Here again, three phases are distinguished. In the first
phase, from 1815 to 1864, attempts by the state to foster industrial enterprise,
and in some instances, to own and direct it, met with only partial success. Polish
experiments with 'the Prussian Road to Capitalism', if such indeed they were,
lacked both capital resources and the support of a heavy industrial base. By
1850, the initiative was passing back into private hands, most typically into con-
sortia formed from native landowning and manufacturing interests and from
foreign concerns. The following decades saw a marked acceleration in the min-
ing, textile, and metallurgical industries; but the delays in agrarian reform and
the persistence of a semi-feudal society prevented any radical redirection of the
mass of the population into the industrial sector.