Japanese vision of the nineteenth-century history of Łódź. A few remarks on Fujii Kazuo’s monograph “Socioeconomic history of Poland in the 19th century – shaping the entrepreneur and modern society in Lodz”, Kwansei Gakuin University Press, Nishinomiya 2

Abstract

Japanese historian Fujii Kazuo, for four decades has been taking up topics related mainly to various aspects of the nineteenth-century history of Lodz, and above all, he is concerned with the different development of this urban center during the partitions not only in Poland, but also in Central and Eastern Europe. Many years ago he devoted his first monograph to this subject, and the currently reviewed book, is a kind of summary of the research work of this Japanese researcher of social and economic history at the time of his retirement. According to his thesis, Lodz, which did not have noble traditions and did not play the role of a political center such as Warsaw, in the 19th century, together with the capital of the Kingdom of Poland, became a great city, unique in the scale of the Russian partition. The dynamism of the development of modern industry in it was the enormous activity of local entrepreneurs, mainly of German and Jewish origin, who, however, permanently penetrated the fabric of the city, creating their “little homeland”.