From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź — Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity 1897–1994 by A. Zysiak K. Śmiechowski K. Piskała W. Marzec K. Kaźmierska J. Burski (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 179 activities grew steadily. Trade promotion, for instance through the Tasmanian International Exhibition in Hobart in 1894–95, or efforts to improve the popular image of Russia, mostly in cooperation with various Eastern orthodox churches, became more important. Until the Russo-Japanese war, Russia was seen as a potential threat to the British Empire in the Asia-Pacific region. By contrast, Russian weakness coupled with the rise of Japan after 1905 as the dominant power in the geopolitics of the region changed perceptions of Russia in Australia. This was not lost on the then consul-general, Matvei Matveevich Gedenshtrom (not to be confused with the Russo-Swedish explorer of Siberia of the same name): ‘The enemy is Britain’s ally Japan’ (doc. no. 100). From 1914–17, with the British and Russian empires now allied against the Central Powers, Russia’s last consul-general at Melbourne, Alexander Abaza, busied himself facilitating the return of Russian subjects to Russia or their enlistment in the Australian forces. He also sought to extend Russian official protection to Austro-Hungarian ‘Slav subjects’ resident in Australia. Abaza, who hailed from a Moldavian noble family, readily continued to serve the Provisional Government after February 1917 but resigned at the end of the year on the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd. He was the last official Russian representative at Melbourne until Australia and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations under the very different conditions of the next world war in 1942. This is a very useful and expertly edited collection of diplomatic sources — complemented by a detailed introduction on the sources, their selection, transliteration and on Russian civil service ranks — that will be of use to anyone studying imperial Russian policy in the Pacific region or Australia’s internal development in the late nineteenth century. School of History T. G. Otte University of East Anglia Zysiak, A., Śmiechowski, K., Piskała, K., Marzec, W., Kaźmierska, K., Burski, J. From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź — Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity 1897–1994. Wydawnictwo Universytetu Łódzkiego, Łódz and Kraków, 2018. 308 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Tables. Notes. Methodological appendix. Bibliography. Index. Zł44.90: $60.00:£47.00 (paperback). Two years ago I visited Łódź, which I had remembered from the early 1990s as a grey and rather depressing place. Since then the city has changed tremendously. As a newcomer its interplay of historical traditions appealed to me — as predatory industrial hub described in Reymont’s Promised Land, SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 180 as the epitome of plan-oriented and monumental socialism and shambles of post-1989 capitalism and gentrification of the recent past. But the people I met — a taxi driver, a local grocer and inhabitants of a rotting tenement house — confused me as they all elaborated on the compromised past, and having learnt where I come from, expressed their envy of my hometown Gdańsk, which they perceived as far more attractive. Citizens of the ‘Polish Manchester’, and the former ‘city of cotton’, seemed to be tired of the Sisyphean task of rolling a boulder up the modernity hill. This remarkable city is the focus of a group of sociologists and historians who have carried out extensive research on press discourses about urban development and the drive for modernity from 1897, when the city was recorded as the fifth largest in the Russian empire, to the early post-Soviet years. Łódź, located right at the geographical heart of contemporary Poland, stands out from most European cities, being both insular and hyper-modern. This study seeks to demonstrate how global ideas combined with Poland’s idiosyncrasies, the violent historic turns of the twentieth century, local policymaking and mass readership to produce principal concepts at ground level. The book comprises four chapters, each one following discourses from different pioneer periods, from late nineteenth-century industrial development through to Polish independence and the beginnings of a socialist city, to post-1989 capitalism. Despite some repetitions and minor inconsistencies, the book is surprisingly cohesive both in concept and narration. It is well-based in the current methodology of historical sociology and intellectual history, and the historical contextualization is impressive in its clarity. Implementing the metaphor of...