Long known as the “Polish Manchester,” thanks to its status as a gritty, rapidly growing textile city in the nineteenth century, Łódź continued to experience the major shocks of the twentieth century in East-Central Europe, including the dissolution of empire and the emergence of the nation state, the two world wars, the rise and fall of Communism, and de-industrialization. As a major industrial center for the Russian Empire, a textile city that drew German-speaking artisans, Polish-speaking peasants, and Jewish petty traders, Łódź exploded from a small city of 32,000 in 1860 to nearly half a million by 1913, half of whom identified as Polish (p. 41). By 1989, it numbered 850,000, nearly all of whom identified as Polish. A unifying theme amidst all of this change, the authors of From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź—Industrial City and Asynchronous Modernity, 1897–1994 argue, is the experience of “asynchronous modernity,” in which the city...

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