THE PROCESS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION I2 5new blast-furnace, named 'Jozef in honour of Viceroy Zajaczek, built at
Kaniow; the River Kamienna was channelled and given a powerful motive cur-
rent; coal and coke was carried from mines at Bfdzin (Bendin) and Dabrowa
(Dombrova), in districts recently acquired from Prussia; copper and silver
works were opened at Bialogon, to support the currency reform; a Polytechnical
Institute was founded in Warsaw; numerous foreign engineers were invited to
accept lucrative appointments, among them Philippe Girard, a French inventor,
who was made technical consultant to the Mining Department at 5,300 roubles
per annum, and the Department's German Director, Ludwig Hauke, at 1,000
roubles per annum. All these innovations occurred as part of Lubecki's trans-
formation of the Congress Kingdoms. It was Lubecki, if no one else, who said
that 'coal and iron is for industry, what bread is for man.' Despite fluctuations
of fortune, the future of Polish heavy industry was assured. In the 1830s, the
Bank Polski invested heavily in steel. The huge Huta Bankowa (Bank
Steelworks) at Dabrowa, built in 1840, was one of the largest of its kind in
Europe - so large in fact that it was unable to run at full capacity until the mar-
ket improved twenty years later.^7
In the course of the nineteenth century, heavy industry developed on all three
sides of the conjunction of the Prussian, Russian, and Austrian frontiers in
Silesia. Upper Silesia grew into Germany's second industrial region after the
Ruhr. The Dabrowa Basin became the principal industrial concentration in the
Congress Kingdom, and, until the growth of Russian industry after 1880, in the
whole Russian Empire. The district of Ostrawa (Ostrava) in the Duchy of
Teschen was the richest industrial area of Austria—Hungary. In all three areas,
predominantly German management combined with Polish labour. Yet, despite
their geographical proximity, the connections between the industries of the
neighbouring partitions were slight. From the Polish point of view, the eco-
nomic pressures were centrifugal, and tended to keep developments within the
bounds of the separate Empires. There was no point in taking coal from
Kattowitz to Da.browa, or vice versa. So the lines of communication ran out-
wards from the three parts of Silesia, to Berlin, Warsaw, and Vienna, but not
across the frontiers. Dabrowa's iron was brought from the Donets in the distant
steppes of Southern Russia rather than from nearby Silesia; its oil came from
Baku, rather than from Galicia.
The development of the textile industry passed through similar stages. By the
end of the eighteenth century, the old spinners' and weavers' guilds, handi-
capped by the proliferation of small merchants and middle men and by their
own restrictive practices, were gradually outflanked by magnatial manufactor-
ies. The old centres of the cottage industry, at Brzeziny, KoSciariy, Biecz, and at
dozens of small towns on either side of the Silesian frontier, had long since lost
the prosperity that they once enjoyed after the Thirty Years War. They were
now due to be overtaken by new locations further east. The old export trade to
Germany was no longer viable. The realm of the wool and linen was about to
be invaded by King Cotton. The first textile mills in the Republic were built by