The Polish Chemical Industry

Abstract

In order to understand the situation of Polish industry, and in particular the chemical industry, during the second half of the nineteenth century some general historical background is necessary. Poland and Lithuania formed one realm in the eighteenth century and this ‘Commonwealth of Both Nations’ was the largest, although not the strongest, country in Europe. From an economic point of view the raw materials found in different parts of this vast country were complementary and formed a good basis for the development of a chemical industry. However the partitioning of Poland between Russia, Prussia and Austria at the end of the eighteenth century put an end to this unity. The three regions that resulted, fragmented and kept apart by state frontiers, constituted peripheral economic districts of the occupying nations. After the Vienna Congress (1815) the three regions inhabited by Poles were: 1) The so-called Polish Congress Kingdom, with Warsaw as the capital and after 1832 incorporated into the Russian Empire; 2) Upper Silesia, with its Polish population for centuries under Austrian and later German rule, and the regions afterwards known as the Grand Duchy of Poznań and East Pomerania, which were, after an earlier annexation by Prussia, in 1871 formally incorporated into the German Empire; and 3) The part annexed by the Austrian Empire, called Galicia, with the capital in Lwów (now Lviv in Ukraine), and which after 1872 achieved some measure of autonomy under the Poles (see figure 4.1).