Portraits of Polish Entrepreneurs: From the Middle Ages to 1939

We prefer to look at Polish history mainly through the prism of politics and military efforts.
Typically, for example, 123 years of the partitioning of Poland are measured by the dates of subsequent failed insurgencies, as opposed to other events of equally major importance to the condition of the Polish people. More Polish people remember better the date of the January Rising than the date of the transition of the Austrian Empire into a dual monarchy. We know more about lost battles than the enfranchisement of peasants in individual Partitions. Consequently, bookshops are full of publications about Polish battles, but you would struggle to find something about the history of the Polish economy.
It is striking that the seminal work, Encyklopedia historii gospodarczej Polski do 1945 roku, was published in the 1980s. In the Third Republic, we have still await a similar publication, and currently the history of the Polish economy is represented mainly by academic textbooks. It is a pity, because an overview of Polish history without including economic issues will always be incomplete.
History, including economic history, is made by people. Hence our idea to tell the story of the Polish economy in various areas - starting from finance and management, and finishing with craftsmanship - by presenting the biographies of those people who contributed to shaping it. When selecting our heroes we have tried to show typical characters for each epoch; we chose those of most interest, even if not always the most important ones. Our 'Portraits' do not aspire to replace scientific studies, nor are they a ranking of the greatest and most famous people, either. Instead, their objective is to acquaint you with the reality of subsequent epochs and show you how - personal, family and public - success was built.
Our biographical journey ends with the Second Republic. The market economy of today, rebuilt after the years of communism, is a topic of a completely different story about quite different people.
Tomasz Wróblewski
President of the Warsaw Enterprise Institute