128 FABRYKAgubernia, whose location inside the new Russian tariff barrier exactly paralleled
that of Lodz in relation to the Polish - Prussian frontier. Woollen weavers, who
in the 1820s had migrated from Silesia to Lodz, in the 1830s moved on to
Bialystok. The old town of the Branickis became an important centre of cloth
manufacture. By 1900, with its satellites of Choroszcz, Fasty, and Suprasl, it had
grown into a conurbation numbering over 100,000 inhabitants.
The linen industry flourished at Zyrardow near Warsaw. The settlement, cre-
ated in 1833 by the French engineer, Philippe Girard, from the Mining
Department, obtained a monopoly of linen production in the Congress
Kingdom from the Russian authorities. By 1885, it employed some 8,500 work-
ers in the small town entirely dominated by the one great factory.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the main textile manufactories
of Russian Poland had outstripped the production of the Prussian and Austrian
Partitions combined. Neither Leignitz (Legnica) and Neustadt (Prudnik) in
Prussian Silesia, nor Bielitz (Bielsko) in Austrian Silesia, or adjacent Biala in
Galicia, could compete with Lodz, Bialystok, or Zyrardow. In the Congress
Kingdom, new joint-stock companies absorbed the smaller private concerns to
the point where in 1914 nine firms employed almost half of the workforce.
Cheap female labour gradually drove male operatives from unskilled employ-
ment. Wages rose steadily but surely. Over-all production advanced in sporadic
leaps and bounds which put Polish textiles near the top of the European pro-
ducers.
In a country where the rural economy still predominated, the role of the min-
ing, metallurgical, and manufacturing industries should not be exaggerated.
The agricultural sector, still run by landowning interests, was equally import-
ant. Sawmills, flour-mills, sugar refineries, breweries, distilleries, tanneries, and
paperworks were to be found in every Polish town and were far more common
than mines and blast-furnaces. The machine industry was largely directed to the
production of agricultural equipment. In many instances, food-processing fac-
tories, such as the sugar refineries of Lower Silesia and Kujawy, or the breweries
of Zywiec and Okocim in Galicia, provided major sources of employment. Even
in Warsaw, they were not overtaken by the metallurgical employers until the
turn of the century.
The oil industry developed late, and was the sole industrial sector where
Galicia led the field; but for a brief period its development was sensational. Oil
was first discovered in the vicinity of Boryslaw in 1850, and the city hospital of
Lemberg was lit by paraffin lamps as early as 1853. Further deposits of oil
and gas were discovered right along the northern slope of the Carpathians.
Deep-drilling techniques imported from Canada by a British engineer,
W. H. MacGarvey, brought spectacular results. Production rose from 2,300 tons
in 1884 to 2,053,000 tons in 1909. As the world's fourth producer at that time,
Galicia's future prospects in Europe were judged second only to those of Baku
and Rumania. By 1914, large international consortia were vying for concessions.
The French Societe Anonyme de Limanowa, the German Deutsche Erdoel AG,