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This study investigates the Warsaw Municipal Bakery from its inception in 1928 to its operation until 1936, a period aimed at modernizing the baking industry within interwar Warsaw. By using primary sources, including audit reports, governmental documents, and contemporary studies, this research primarily analyzes the economic strategies and public investments linked to the bakery. It examines the operational challenges – including management inefficiencies, technical obstacles, and private-sector resistance – while situating them within the broader economic policies and socioeconomic context of the time. The study further explores the gap between the intended modernization goals and the actual outcomes, highlighting the ideological and political motivations behind public investments. Additionally, it discusses the impact of such public investments on the local economy, assessing both the intended modernizing effects and the practical outcomes. This work contributes a detailed case study to the historical understanding of public investments in the Polish economy during the interwar period. It underlines the complex interplay between economic goals and actual managerial and technical outcomes, providing insights into the challenges and limitations of municipal-driven economic initiatives.

Why were most ethnic minority organizations in interwar Poland permitted and sometimes encouraged by the state, when the ruling titular ethnic group pursued discriminatory policies against the same minority groups, faced hostility from these groups, and had the capacity to repress their organizations? Current literature focuses on repression as the main strategy deployed by states to manage these relationships. This article, on the other hand, asks why states allow minority organizations to operate. Using the logic of divide and rule, this article demonstrates that, in the case of multi-ethnic states, a state may prefer a plurality of organizations representing a certain minority ethnic group, particularly if the group is restive, in order to ensure that a united opposition cannot legitimately threaten the state's political survival.

Although blackface minstrelsy is considered to be one of the first American pop culture products, its circulation in central and eastern Europe is relatively unknown. This article engages with the history of blackface performance and imagery in Poland, treating it as a lens granting insight into ways of imagining blackness in the region. It focuses on the interwar period as a time of rapid adaptation of colonial imagination with its global racial hierarchies in the public sphere of the newly independent country. Against the ideology of “colonial exceptionalism” and “white innocence” based on an assumption that Poland—as a state with no history of overseas colonies and Black slavery—is free of anti-black racism, we describe the active involvement of large groups of society in transnational colonial imagination, developed especially in the sphere of entertainment. The article not only demonstrates the existence of the tradition of blackface in Poland and reconstructs its distinct character but also suggests structural determinants that continue to affect ideas about blackness in Poland today.

The aim of this paper is to determine how the economic crisis, and the ad hoc attempts made by the authorities to counteract it, affected the Polish society and, above all, to prepare a multidimensional analysis of how the crisis impacted systemic changes in the Polish social policy. The author will examine both positive changes that followed the relevant global trends and also negative changes that resulted from the developmental lag, the country’s economic situation and especially the generally low involvement of the state via public funding in activities that were part of the state’s social policy. Assessment of Polish social policy during the crisis must be ambiguous. On the one hand, systemic changes in social policy introduced as a result of the economic collapse can be clearly distinguished, on the other hand, however, the severity of the crisis visibly affected many activities of state and local governments in the social sphere. These activities posed unsuccessful attempts to rescue the situation in the labour market. Additionally, an effective response to deepening poverty was missing, amendments adopted to labour legislation were disadvantageous to employees, and finally fundamental sacrifices in terms of social policy were made as the lawmakers passed the Unification Act during the crisis. Polish social policy was unable, for a number of reasons, to essentially redefine its approach to addressing the numerous social issues it had to face.

This article is devoted to an institution of European civil law known as familial fideicommissa, through which the status of familial estates could be modified to protect a particular family’s position and wealth. In this system, ownership of the estate was transferred to the whole family, and one male member was appointed as a ‘trustee’. The assets of this property were not subjected to standard inheritance law provisions and were excluded from other general civil law rules, and the trustee was not allowed to sell the estate, burden it with debt, or include it in his will. The article focuses on practical aspects of the functioning of familial fideicommissa in the interwar period. The author analyses five court cases associated with three instances of fideicommissa from the Radziwłł family, which are reconstructed from historical archival documents deponed in the Lithuanian State Archive in Vilnius. The author focuses on highlighting problems in the interpretation and implementation of the legal provisions of the Third Lithuanian Statute (1588) and the Digest of Laws of the Russian Empire (1832) on familial fideicommissa by Polish courts.

The historical literature on interwar Polish policy on Belarusians and other minorities focuses primarily on the relationship between the regime in power and minority groups as a single block, failing to note instances in which regime policies toward specific organizations have not been uniform. Despite the fact that Belarusian ethnic identity was ambiguous and national consciousness low, no fewer than 13 political organizations in interwar Poland claimed to represent the minority. The most influential organization was the Belarusian Peasants’ and Workers’ Union Hromada. Less than two years after the organization’s inception, it was banned in 1927. This article examines why an organization like Hromada, which did not resort to violence and in fact took pains to operate within the legal framework of the Polish constitution, was shuttered by the state, while other organizations with similar profiles were allowed to operate. The article reveals that Hromada was not banned strictly due to what the government considered its radical ideology or because it was an antisystem party, but rather it was banned for its ability to suppress organizational pluralism among Belarusian organizations. The article advances the existing literature by (a) shifting away from analyzing the dynamics between a state and an ethnic group as a whole, by disaggregating the level of analysis to focus on minority political organizations, and by (b) going beyond ideology as the main explanatory variable dictating state policies toward minorities.

This article explores the narratives describing the interactions between students of the Catholic University of Lublin and the local Jewish population. It analyzes oral histories from the “Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre” archive using the theoretical framework of intergroup contact theory, intersectionality, and the concept of contact zone. The study presents the accounts thematically, according to the circumstances of the violent behavior, and notes its gendered nature— it was perpetrated mostly by Catholic men. Moreover, it seeks an explanation for these situations and, finally, points to the theory of memory of meanings as a helpful interpretative tool.

The Circle of Jewish Women (“Koło Kobiet Żydowskich”), founded in Lemberg/Lviv in 1908 and active until 1939, played a vital role in the organization of Zionist women in the city and other places in Eastern Galicia. It was founded, among others, by Róża Pomeranc Melcer, one of the pioneers of Zionist women’s associations in Galicia and the first and only Jewish woman parliamentarian in the Second Polish Republic. Nevertheless, the history of the Circle, as well as the work of its many active members—many of whom perished in the Holocaust—has been almost forgotten and is rarely explored. The author of the article argues that this organization not only represents social welfare, but it also embodies elements of social support, cultural work, politicization, and feminism. Therefore, the author emphasizes the role the Circle played in the process of organizing Zionist women in Lviv and Galicia before World War I and especially during the interwar period in the Second Polish Republic, and how it contributed to women’s emancipation. Thus, the history of one of the most important Zionist women’s organizations is reconstructed and its versatile work facets explored in more detail.

This article examines anti-Jewish violence in the Second Polish Republic through the lens of gender. By focusing on verbal and physical attacks against female Jewish students at Polish universities in the 1930s, it highlights the radicalization of the antisemitic movement among Poland’s future elite. Jewish women experienced discrimination and increasingly also violence at Polish universities as Jews and as women. The assaults suggest the need to examine both gender and Jewish differences. Although all Jewish students were targets of violent antisemitic attacks, women were especially vulnerable when they dared transgress gender boundaries by acting in “unfeminine ways” and signifying their intellectual empowerment—talking back, resisting, or defending Jewish men under attack. Indeed, Jewish women who stood up to their attackers transgressed the norms of both gender and Jewishness, and were thus doubly exposed to aggression and violence. Using the contemporary Jewish press, university archives, memoirs and testimonies, the female Jewish experience and the response of male Jewish students and community activists are reconstructed. Understanding these assaults as a window into gender politics in Jewish student associations, the Jewish press and Jewish communal institutions, the author examines their place in the public discourse of the Second Polish Republic.

The paper argues that epidemic surveillance and state-building were closely interconnected in interwar Poland. Starting from the paper technology of weekly epidemiological reporting it discusses how the reporting scheme of Polish epidemics came into being in the context of a typhus epidemic in 1919–20. It then shows how the statistics regarding nation-wide epidemics was put into practice. It is only when we take into account these practices that we can understand the epidemiological order the statistics produced. The preprinted weekly report form registered Jews and Christians separately. Yet, the imagined national epidemiological space that emerged from it hardly took notice of this separation. Rather, the category that differentiated Polish epidemiological space in medical discourse was the capacity of contributing to the state-making practices of epidemic surveillance. This category divided Poland into two regions: a civilized and modern western region and a backward and peripheral eastern region.