THE PROCESS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION 121In the second phase, from 1864 to 1918, many of the former inhibitions were
removed, and Polish industry was drawn into the wider forum of European
trade, finance, and labour. The years 1864 to 1883 saw a massive influx of west-
ern capital and machinery. At this time the Polish lands straddled the main
divide of the European industrial map, separating the developed regions of
Germany from the backward expanses of Russia and Austria. After 1880, the
dividing line was artificially emphasized by Russia's protective tariff barrier,
behind which the former Congress Kingdom prospered. For three decades
before the First World War, Polish manufactures played a prominent role in the
economy of the Russian Empire as a whole. The railway network expanded
rapidly. Mechanization proliferated. Industrial concentrations transformed the
landscape of specific geographical areas. Investment capital was made available
through a decline in agricultural returns. Private enterprises were merged into
public stock companies. Small-scale factories were linked into larger combines.
Although peasant agriculture and small-scale, petty businesses continued to
dominate the economy as a whole, the industrial sector reached a peak of per-
formance in 1913.
In the third phase, from 1918 to 1939, the state authorities of the newly inde-
pendent Republic fought against the odds to combine three separate industrial
systems into an integrated whole, and, with manifestly inadequate resources, to
construct an efficient infrastructure. Their tentative steps were rudely ter-
minated by the Second World War, whose conclusion, as in most spheres of
Polish life, necessitated a completely fresh start.
Poland's First Industrialization has inspired a great deal of economic theoriz-
ing, especially of the Marxist variety. Rosa Luxemburg's Promyshlennoye
Razvitie Pol'sbi (The Industrial Development of Poland) published in St.
Petersburg in 1899 provided the theoretical arguments on which the Polish com-
munist movement based its strategy for the first forty years of its existence. In
her view, Polish industry formed an integral part of the Russian economy, and
as such was essential to her hopes that Russia would share in the coming prole-
tarian revolution of Germany and Western Europe. By the same token, she held
that Polish Independence would be a retrograde step, which could only damage
the prospects for Russian and European progress as a whole. (It was for this rea-
son no doubt that the Tsarist censor approved her work for publication.^2 )
Oskar Lange (1904-65), Poland's first delegate to the United Nations, whose
Ekonomia polityczna (Political Economy) appeared in 1959, was more con-
cerned with the typology of industrialization. According to his lights, Polish
industry showed features characteristic of the 'capitalistic' and of the 'socialist'
but not of the 'national-revolutionary' types.^3
Yet non-Marxist models are no more helpful. Rostow's theory of economic
growth, for example, can be applied to the history of the Congress Kingdom,
and would suggest that the transformation of the 'Traditional Society' pro-
ceeded fitfully through the nineteenth century and that the crucial period of
industrial 'take-off occurred in the last three decades before the First World