Nationalism, religion, citizenship, and work in the development of the Polish working class and the Polish trade union movement, 1815-1929. A comparative study of Russian Poland's textile workers and upper Silesian miners and metalworkers

An exploration of how social, cultural, and political experiences of Polish industrial workers under Russian and Prussian rule marked the interwar labor movement. The work begins with an examination of the national particularities inherent in the development of Prussian Silesia's extractive mining and metalworking industry and Russian Poland's textile industry. Then, it shows that by the 1890's issues about the "germination" of the workplace became inextricably linked to questions of Polish religious, linguistic, and national identity. From here, the narrative describes how different responses by government officials and employers to parallel sets of economic, national, and labor issues cast the two labor movements in very different directions even if the vast majority of workers in both industries endorsed Polish Christian trade unionist strategies.;The second half of the dissertation examines how workers in both industries altered the institutional, national, and political strategies of the partition period to the conditions of independent Polish statehood. After a brief sketch of the alterations in working-class conceptions of industrial, political, and social community wrought by World War I, the central focus of the inquiry shifts to an examination of industrial politics between 1924-1929. The drive by Poland's foreign industrialists to overcome the economic legacies of partition challenged the definitions of citizenship workers brought with them into the interwar era and simultaneously unleashed yet another cycle of nationalist politics. A conclusion, sketching the evolution of labor politics, offers clues as to why changes in industrial life fissured established labor organization, and gave way to an organized labor movement where Silesian miners and metalworkers embraced the syndicalist strategies sponsored by Jozef Pilsudski's government whereas the textile workers endorsed socialist and communist labor organizations.