Category Archives: war

by Joel | 24 September 2025 · 6:32 pm

Goa Falls to Portugal, 1510

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 249-252:

AT THE ISLAND OF Anjediva, Albuquerque was surprised to meet a small squadron of four ships bound for faraway Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula, under the command of Diogo Mendes de Vasconcelos. Manuel had airily ordered this insignificant force to conquer the place. Some of the financing had been provided by Florentine investors; their representatives included Giovanni da Empoli, who had accompanied Albuquerque on an earlier voyage. Empoli found the governor “very displeased at the defeat sustained in Goa and also about many other things.”

Empoli’s surviving account, written probably two years later during a bout of scurvy while becalmed off the coast of Brazil, is sour and peevish. He recounts how Albuquerque was obsessed with Goa, determined to return and take it as soon as possible; he needed all the forces he could muster, including the squadron bound for Malacca, and, given the wearisome ordeal in the Mandovi River, he needed to be sly about his tactics in order to get consent from his commanders. Albuquerque had seen the potential of the island, and he feared that the return of a Rume fleet could render it an impregnable base against Portuguese interests. He stressed the approaching threat of a new armada. To Empoli, the Egyptian menace had become a phony war: “the news about the Rume was what had been expected for many years past, but the truth had never been known…at present such news could not be considered as certain because of the lack of credibility on the part of the Muslims.” Privately, he accused Albuquerque of concocting letters, with the aid of Malik Ayaz in Diu to bolster his case.

Whatever the truth of this, Albuquerque quickly managed to reason, bully, or cajole the fleet, including the Malacca squadron, into a new strike. Given the sensitivity of the Portuguese factions in Cochin and Cannanore, this was a considerable feat. Word from the ever-alert Timoji informed him that Adil Shah had left Goa to fight new wars with Vijayanagar; the moment was right. Two months of frenetic refitting and reprovisioning readied the fleet. At a council in Cochin on October 10 he imposed his will on the captains: let those who would follow him, follow. Those who refused must give their explanations to the king. The matter of Malacca and the Red Sea would be rapidly returned to afterward. Again, by sheer force of personality, and some threats, he carried the day. Diogo Mendes de Vasconcelos, with the reluctant Florentines in tow, agreed to postpone the visit to Malacca. Even the mutineers in the Ruy Dias episode, who had preferred to stay in prison, were released and joined up. On October 16, Albuquerque was writing a letter of justification to the king, explaining yet again why he persisted with Goa: “You will see how good it is, Your Highness, that if you are lord of Goa you throw the whole realm of India into confusion … there is nowhere on the coasts as good or secure as Goa, because it’s an island. If you lost the whole of India you could reconquer it from there.” This time it was not just a matter of conquest. Goa was to be utterly purged of a Muslim presence.

On the following day he set sail with nineteen ships and sixteen hundred men. By November 24, the fleet was back in the mouth of the Mandovi. Increasingly the Portuguese did not fight alone. Within the fractious power struggles of coastal India, they were able to pull small principalities into their orbit. The sultan of Honavar sent a reputed fifteen thousand men by land; again Timoji was able to raise four thousand and supply sixty small vessels. Adil Shah, however, had not left Goa undefended. He had placed a garrison of eight thousand men—White Turks, the Portuguese called these men, experienced mercenaries from the Ottoman empire and Iran—and a number of Venetian and Genoese renegades with good technical knowledge of cannon founding.

Deciding not to wait, on November 25, St. Catherine’s Day, Albuquerque divided his forces in three and attacked the town from two directions. What followed was not a triumph for the organized military tactics he had been trying to instill. It was the traditional berserker fighting style of the Portuguese that won the day. With cries of “St. Catherine! Santiago!” the men rushed the barricades below the town. One soldier managed to jam his weapon into the city gate to prevent it from being closed by the defenders. Elsewhere a small, agile man named Fradique Fernandes forced his spear into the wall and hoisted himself up onto the parapet, where he stood waving a flag and shouting, “Portugal! Portugal! Victory!”

Distracted by this sudden apparition, the defenders lost the tussle to slam the gate shut. It was ripped open, and the Portuguese poured inside. As the defenders fell back, they were hit by another unit, which had smashed through a second gate. The fighting was extremely bloody. The Portuguese chroniclers reported acts of demented bravery.

…

The Muslim resistance collapsed. Men tried to flee from the city across the shallow fords, where many drowned. Others who made it across were met by the Hindu allies. “They came to my aid via the fords and from the mountains,” Albuquerque later wrote. “They put to the sword all the Muslims who escaped from Goa without sparing the life of a single creature.” It had taken just four hours.

Albuquerque shut the gates to stop his men intemperately chasing their enemies. Then he gave the city up to sack and massacre. The aftermath was bloody. The city was to be rid of all Muslims.

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by Joel | 24 September 2025 · 3:30 am

Portuguese Adopt Swiss Tactics

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 227-229:

Manuel, chronically fearful of entrusting power to any one man, had decided to create three autonomous governments in the Indian Ocean. Nominally Albuquerque had authority to act in only the central segment—the west coast of India from Gujarat to Ceylon. The coasts of Africa, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf were the domain of Duarte de Lemos. Beyond Ceylon, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira had responsibility for Malacca and the farthest Orient. This dispersal of forces was strategically flawed, as neither of the other two commanders had sufficient ships for effective action. Albuquerque not only saw the pointlessness of this division, he also believed that no one was as capable as himself. Over a period of time, he found ways of obtaining the ships of the other commanders and integrating them into one unified command, without royal say-so. It made for an effective deployment of military resources; it also made him enemies, both in India and back at court, who would snipe at his methods and malign his intentions to the king.

Equally unpopular was the issue of military organization. The massacre at Calicut had highlighted the shortcomings of the way the Portuguese fought. The military code of the fidalgos valued heroic personal deeds over tactics, the taking of booty and prizes over the achievement of strategic objectives. Men-at-arms were tied by personal and economic loyalties to their aristocratic leaders rather than to an overall commander. Victories were gained by acts of individual valor rather than rational planning. The Portuguese fought with a ferocity that stunned the peoples of the Indian Ocean, but their methods were medieval and chaotic and, not infrequently, suicidal. It was in this spirit that Lourenço de Almeida had refused to blast the Egyptian fleet out of the water at Chaul and Coutinho had attempted to march into Calicut with a cane and a cap. The laudatory roll calls of fidalgos who went down to the last man pepper the pages of the chronicles. Yet it was clear, too, though cowardice was the ultimate smirch on a fidalgo’s name and the merest whisper of a refusal to fight had ultimately cost Lourenço his life, that the ill-disciplined rank and file could crack under pressure.

Albuquerque was certainly in thrall to Manuel’s messianic ideas of medieval crusade but, like the king himself, he was also keenly aware of the military revolution sweeping Europe. In the Italian wars of the late fifteenth century, bands of professional Swiss mercenaries, drilled to march and fight as organized groups, had revolutionized battlefield tactics. Highly maneuverable columns of trained men, armed with pikes and halberds, had steamrollered their opponents in tight mass formations. Albuquerque, with the energy of a zealot, set about reorganizing and instructing men in the tactics and disciplines of the new warfare. At Cochin, he formed the first trained bands. Immediately after his return from Calicut he wrote to Manuel, asking for a corps of soldiers practiced in the Swiss techniques and for the officers to instruct the India men. As it was, he proceeded anyway. Men were formally enrolled in corps, taught to march in formation and in the use of the pike. Each “Swiss” corps had its own corporals, standard-bearers, pipers, and clerk—as well as monthly payment. To encourage the status of this new regimental structure, Albuquerque himself would sometimes shoulder a pike and march with the men.

Within a month of his return from Calicut, he was again sailing north up the coast of India, this time with a revitalized fleet: twenty-three ships, 1,600 Portuguese soldiers and sailors, plus 220 local troops from the Malabar Coast and 3,000 “fighting slaves,” who carried baggage and supplies and in extreme cases might be enrolled in the fight. The initial objective of this expedition appears to have been ill-defined. There were rumors that the Mamluk sultan was preparing a new fleet at Suez to avenge the crushing defeat at Diu. But Albuquerque kept his cards close to his chest. Anchored at Mount Deli on February 13, he explained to his commanders that he had letters from the king to go to Ormuz; he also dropped in news of the Red Sea threat—and casually mentioned the subject of Goa, a city that had never figured in Portuguese plans. Four days later, to the surprise of almost everyone, they were embarked on its capture.

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Filed under Africa, migration, military, nationalism, Portugal, religion, South Asia, Switzerland, war

by Joel | 13 September 2025 · 7:20 am

Afonso de Albuquerque vs. Ormuz

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle p. 173:

That Albuquerque possessed an intemperate streak was becoming increasingly apparent, not just to the hapless Omanis but also to his own captains. It was usual for the captain-major to consult with his ship commanders and, often, to be subject to a vote of the whole group. Albuquerque, intelligent, impatient, and possessed of an unshakable belief in his own abilities, had no such tact or cooperative spirit. The captains had been nominally informed at the start of the Omani expedition, but as the weeks wore on the relationship became strained. By mid-September they were inside the mouth of the Persian Gulf, increasingly distant from the key task to which they had been assigned: blocking the mouth of the Red Sea. The drive up the Arabian coast had one clear destination in Albuquerque’s mind: the island city of Ormuz, a small nugget of parched rock anchored offshore that was the axis of all Gulf traffic between Persia and the Indian Ocean. It was an immensely wealthy trading place—the great Arab traveler Ibn Battuta had found it “a fine large city with magnificent bazaars” and tall handsome houses. When the Chinese star fleet had called, they’d declared “the people of the country…very rich….There are no poor families.” It controlled the famed pearl fisheries of the Persian Gulf and dispatched large numbers of Arabian horses to meet an insatiable demand among the warring empires of continental India. “If the world were a ring, then Ormuz would be the jewel in it,” ran the Persian proverb. Albuquerque was well aware of the city’s reputation and strategic worth.

Aggressive action against Ormuz seems to have formed no part of his instructions from King Manuel to “establish treaties.” The harbor was thronged with merchant ships when Albuquerque arrived, but he proceeded in customary style. He refused all gifts from the king’s messengers; his reply was simple: become vassals of the Portuguese crown or see your city destroyed. The chief vizier, Hwaga Ata, concluded that Albuquerque, with just six ships, was a seriously deluded man, but on the morning of September 27, 1507, in a hubbub of noise, Portuguese bronze cannons again outgunned a far larger Muslim fleet. The vizier quickly sued for peace, accepted Manuel as his lord, and agreed to payment of a hefty annual tribute.

Albuquerque saw the hand of the Christian God at work in the victory.

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Filed under Arabia, economics, Iran, migration, military, nationalism, Portugal, religion, war

by Joel | 7 September 2025 · 1:02 am

From Most Prisoners In Hawaiʻi’s WWII Internment Camp Were Korean, by Kirsten Downey (Honolulu: Civil Beat, 5 September 2025). While hundreds of Japanese-Americans were the first held at Honouliuli, many more Koreans followed:

The Honouliuli internment camp in central O’ahu is best known in Hawaiʻi as the place some 400 Japanese Americans were detained during World War II.

But new research is bringing to light the fact that Koreans were the largest single population group there.

In fact, there were seven times as many Koreans held there as Japanese Americans. Of the 4,000 people held, about 2,700 were Korean, captured elsewhere and brought to Hawaiʻi, and about 400 were Japanese Americans who had been living and working in Hawaiʻi when the war broke out.

The Koreans were prisoners of war who fell into American hands as U.S. forces made their way across Oceania fighting Japanese imperial forces, who had seized lands all across the Pacific, including in China, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and French Indochina (now Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), Guam, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Most of the Koreans were in fact doubly prisoners: The Japanese, who had invaded and conquered Korea in the early 1900s, had conscripted many of them against their will. Dragooned by the Japanese, they then ended up American prisoners when the Japanese garrisons fell.

The little-known fact that Koreans made up the lion’s share of residents at the internment camp is becoming the focus of new academic scrutiny and discussion.

Korean Prisoners Identified

Last year, researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi’s Center for Oral History began a new collaboration with the National Park Service to collect accounts from the Korean or Korean American descendants of people who were detained at the camp or who worked there to incorporate this new information into current understanding and historical interpretation.

This work builds on the scholarship of Duk Hee Lee Murabayashi, president of the Korean Immigration Research Institute in Hawaiʻi, and Professor Yong-ho Ch’oe, who taught Korean history at the University of Hawaiʻi and was the author of a book about Korean immigration to Hawaiʻi called “From the Land of Hibiscus: Koreans in Hawai‘i, 1903–1950.” Ch’oe died last year.

Murabayashi has identified the 2,700 Koreans held at Honouliuli, providing their names and home locations, which is helping people identify their deceased relatives.

…

‘A Complete Shock’

The fact that so many Koreans were present in the camp during World War II has come as a surprise even to the Korean community.

“Until a few months ago, I certainly did not know about Koreans who, during World War II, ended up as prisoners of war right here in Hawaiʻi at Honouliuli Internment Camp,” said David Suh, president of the United Korean Association of Hawaiʻi, at a recent talk hosted by the park.

“It came to me as a complete shock,” said Edward Shultz, former director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi and the immediate past president of the Korean American Foundation.

…

As the war progressed and American forces began advancing on Japanese-controlled strongholds, they took a number of Koreans into custody as prisoners of war, bringing them to the internment camp at Honouliuli. According to the National Park Service, hundreds arrived after each battle in the Pacific, including from Guam, Peleliu, Tinian and Palau, sometimes intermingled with Japanese prisoners.

Following the 1944 battle in Saipan, the NPS reported, about 350 Koreans arrived, all noncombatants, many with bullet and slash wounds. The bullet wounds came from the American troops, but the Koreans also appeared to have been victims of sword attacks by Japanese, suggesting they suffered systematic abuse.

Relations between the Koreans and the Japanese Americans at the camp became at times so strained that they had to be kept separate from each other, said Professor Alan Rosenfeld, the associate vice president of academic programs and policy at the University of Hawaiʻi, who has spent years studying Honouliuli.

“There are archival incidents of Koreans and Japanese fighting,” said Mary Kunmi Yu Danico, director of the University of Hawaiʻi’s Center for Oral History, who is leading the project to gather oral histories of the descendants of people who lived or worked at the camp.

…

Word began to seep out in Hawaiʻi that Koreans were there, probably because the American military hired some local Korean Americans to serve as translators and guards at the camp.

The first published report that Koreans were living at Honouliuli came in the pages of the Methodist Church bulletin in 1944, according to Murayabushi [Murabayashi!]. Church leaders had apparently been told that many Korean men in their 20s and 30s were being held there, and that they were bored and lonely. The first notice about their existence came when the church asked if anyone had spare musical instruments they would be willing to donate so the men could entertain themselves.

Later, church leaders began organizing an outreach to them, delivering Christmas gifts and arranging to loan them books.

That means there may be people living in Hawaiʻi today who recall those years and those interactions. Murayabushi [Murabayashi!], Danico and Ogura are asking people to come forward to share those memories.

For an earlier blogpost about Korean POWs in WW2, see Koreans, Taiwanese, and Okinawans Among Japanese POWs. See also Origins of Korean POWs in Hawaii, excerpted from an article by the late Yong-ho Ch’oe, mentioned above. Prof. Ch’oe was a fine scholar and a kind gentleman.

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Filed under Hawai'i, Japan, Korea, labor, language, migration, military, nationalism, U.S., war

by Joel | 6 September 2025 · 1:31 am

Bolívar Recalibrates National Identity

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 203-205:

By 1819 Bolívar delivered the justly famous Angostura speech to the second Venezuelan Congress. What he said then laid out a plan based on Boves’ insight into colonial society. For years, the Angostura text has been read as an example of a centralizing Bolívar advocating for a strong state that accommodates patrician institutions like a hereditary House of Lords. The most radical aspect of the speech is seldom mentioned.

Going well beyond what he had written in the Cartagena Manifesto, Bolívar seeks to explain the fragmentation and hatred within the colonial territories. Many decades before Vallenilla Lanz and Uslar Pietri had articulated the fracture at the country’s heart, he already speaks of a society on the verge of falling apart: “The diversity of origin requires an infinitely firm grip, an infinitely delicate tact to manage this heterogenous society whose complicated artifice can be dislocated, divided, and dissolved with the slightest altercation.”

The key phrase is “diversity of origin,” which acknowledged at the very beginning of the 1800s that Venezuela was, at its core, a multi-ethnic and multi-racial society. The explanation goes into considerable detail,

“We must be aware that our people are not Europeans, or North Americans: they’re a composite of Africa and the Americas rather than a product of Europe; even Spain itself is no longer European due to its African blood, its institutions and its character. It is impossible to properly decide to which human family we belong. The largest part of the indigenous population has been annihilated, the European has mixed with those of the Americas and those of Africa, and they have mixed with Indians and with Europeans …”

No one had ever described the facts and uncertainties of ethnic and racial differences in this way. Boves’ de facto solution had been to promote the extermination of all whites. Creole society’s program sought to reenact the colonial caste system. Many ignored the issue and pretended it was not relevant. As the years went by and a battery of constitutions dismantled the caste system’s nominal rules, and later, slavery, most of the country’s intellectual establishment chose to ignore the subject.

The speech’s enduring passage defines the conundrum faced by countries in the Caribbean basin: “our parents, different in origin and blood, are foreigners, and all have visibly different skin: the dissimilarity brings a challenge of the highest order.” In the context of his time, and that of many decades after him, Bolívar proposes a radical solution: “The blood of our fellow citizens is different. Let’s mix it in order to unify it …”

The speech promotes a mixed-race country with a historical dimension and a spiritual path. Boves’ men had lived their day-to-day in a new kind of army: multi-ethnic, horizontal, and devoid of rankings based on skin color or national origin. This had been a revolutionary social experiment. Bolívar wanted a society based on that model and included his ethnic group in the mix.

While the concept of nation proposed at Angostura had nothing to do with the Creole ideals of the older Cartagena Manifesto, Bolívar continued to advocate for a powerful ruler and a centralizing seat of power.

The speech summarizes the late Bolívar’s prescription for the country: fuse all nations and races and ethnicities into a new brown Venezuelan identity and superimpose a powerful central state to combat factionalism and special interests.

Although this was never clearly stated, one hundred years later Rómulo Betancourt founded his political project upon those ideas. Acción Democrática would create a vast and centralized welfare state unimaginable to Bolívar in its scope, reach, and sheer power. And the party and its leaders would work tirelessly to create one nation around the idea of Juan Bimba, a racially mixed John Doe that stood for the average (and ideal) Venezuelan.

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by Joel | 28 August 2025 · 12:25 am

Venezuela’s Civil War of Independence

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 21-23:

Venezuelan children of the Concorde generation were taught a particular story of Venezuelan independence. It all started, according to the narrative, in a sleepy colonial outpost known as the Royal Captaincy General of Venezuela that was peacefully plodding along at the end of the 1700s. By 1808 Napoleon had invaded Spain, imprisoned the King, and imposed a puppet government over the empire in the Americas. Venezuelan Creoles, using the Cabildo de Caracas, seized the opportunity in 1810 to break away from a now-illegitimate monarchy, proclaimed sovereignty, wrote brilliant declarations, and led the first independence armies.

Yet, the Creole independent forces were, to their surprise, systematically defeated between 1810 and 1817. They seized Caracas twice, and declared and established independent Republics both times, only to be crushed. Their most famous representative and eventual leader, Simón Bolívar, commanded the country’s most important garrison during the first uprising, only to end up in exile in Cartagena. Years later he led the failed Second Republic before fleeing again.

What the elementary school stories never mention is that with the Spanish King imprisoned, and nearly every Spanish soldier on the planet fighting the French on Iberian soil, the so-called “royal” soldiers defeating the First and the Second Republics were mostly locals. The conflict was never one between newly self-conscious Venezuelans and royal Spaniards, but rather one between castes. The war of the First Republic was one of Pardos against Creole-led armies. Those of mixed-race felt no allegiance to the King, had no interest in the monarchy, and did not feel Spanish in any way. They flew the King’s standards, but they were fighting against Creole rule.

…

Pardos, free Africans, mutinous slaves, and many others of indigenous descent, destroyed Creole-led pro-independence governments twice in four long years. They battled Creole-led armies that sought to preserve the caste system and slavery in a newly independent republic. As the third chapter of this book chronicles in detail, the social and military dynamics had changed by 1816. Still, the first half of the independence wars remains critical to understanding what happened by the 1820s.

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Filed under democracy, migration, military, nationalism, slavery, Spain, Venezuela, war

by Joel | 14 August 2025 · 2:32 am

1848 in Ireland

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 85-86:

The government in London still declined to recognise the state of Ireland’s rapidly diminishing population. There was little fight left in the people, little strength to fight the hunger and none at all to fight the British who mistook the mood of the people and remained insensitive to the reality of their situation: even peasant armies cannot fight on empty bellies. Tenants on some of the larger estates banded together to avoid paying rents, current or arrears, and formed combinations while in the towns and cities Confederate Clubs were set up; but that was as far as they went – there is no evidence of well-organised conspiracies to murder landlords or agents, however much they were hated. But the apprehension of an Irish uprising had been growing steadily for more than two years among Britain’s leaders. Elsewhere in Europe, uprisings were rife: in January 1848 the people in Sicily forced concessions from their King; in February a bloodless revolution overthrew the French Parliament; in early March the army in Vienna was routed by the city’s people; then the Austrian rulers were driven out of Milan by the Italians. These winter insurrections encouraged radical leaders of the Young Ireland Party to rebel. As a result, in March three men, William Smith O’Brien, Thomas Meagher and John Mitchel, were arrested and charged with sedition. After the first two were acquitted, the third, Mitchel, a journalist, was tried in May under another act and convicted. The Attorney General in London had just drafted a new Treason Felony Act, decreeing, ‘… any person who, by open and advised speaking, compassed the intimidation of the Crown or of Parliament,’ was made guilty of felony. And in the current climate any person found guilty under this Act would be sure to face a heavy sentence – transportation to an overseas colony possibly for life. Within an hour of the jury returning their verdict, and sentencing Mitchel to 14 years’ transportation, he was on his way out of the country, not on an emigrant ship but aboard a British warship, bound for Tasmania on the other side of the world.

Fear is often fuelled by rumour, which was rife at the time. Misleading stories spread of great protest gatherings, 10,000-strong, and marches of 20,000 militants were reported to London. It was rumoured than an Irish Brigade was being raised in America, and that the Confederate Clubs were arming their members. As a result, the British Government determined to quash the threat of a peasant uprising. More English troops and weapons poured into Dublin and spread around the country. Additional English warships were despatched to strengthen the fleet at Cove, near Cork.

The British decided that further examples should be made among the would-be leaders and early in July, Thomas Meagher, son of the Mayor of Waterford, was re-arrested. His speeches in previous years, urging armed rebellion, had earned him the title Meagher of the Sword. He was detained by the police right outside the offices of the Waterford Chronicle whose editorial that day, on July 12th, cautioned against immediate rebellion, urging instead, ‘Wait until England is engaged in a major European war. The Chronicle will equip 200,000 men to fight against England.’

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by Joel | 5 August 2025 · 7:53 am

Piecing Poland Back Together, 1920s

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 553-555:

The first task facing the new state was to recover from the devastation of the war, which had been enormous. Much of the infrastructure of the country had to be rebuilt from scratch. Industry needed to be developed, as there was huge unemployment. And agriculture, which had been disrupted and ravaged by the war, needed to be put back on its feet. The country was impoverished; it was also experiencing a food crisis. To boot, some four hundred thousand Poles had died fighting in the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian armies during World War I, which meant a depletion of the best patriotic forces.

Another enormous challenge concerned the knitting together of disparate pieces of territory and peoples who had experience of very different imperial regimes—different legal systems, educational systems, forms of national and local governance, and the like. The enormity of the physical task of bringing together the previously partitioned lands, after 123 years of belonging to states other than Poland, was reflected in the network of railways. The railways all led to the imperial hubs, thus being a centrifugal not a unifying force. New railway branches had to be added to facilitate travel to the capital of Warsaw as well as to cross the breadth and length of the state. Even today one still notes a particular denseness of railway lines in the west (the former Germany), light coverage in the east, and the south best served by the Galician west–east line connecting Kraków with Lviv and beyond.

Those businesses that were able to resume operation relatively quickly now faced a different domestic market. No longer were they able to export to Berlin, Vienna, or Saint Petersburg. And if they had relied in part on inputs available elsewhere in those empires, they would need to find new suppliers within the borders of the new state. The country experienced a painful bout of hyperinflation in 1923: at one point, one U.S. dollar was worth 20 million Polish marks. The replacement of the mark by the zloty in the spring of 1924 and the concomitant currency correction essentially wiped out the savings of the country’s middle class. This did not augur well for the economic well-being of the citizens of the young Polish state.

As the history of partition suggests, not all Polish citizens were equally prepared for national independence. Regionalism became pronounced, as inhabitants felt they had more in common with those who came from their partitioned zone than with those from other partitioned zones. Few had any real experience of self-rule, making Galicians the most likely candidates to move to the new capital, Warsaw, to help run the new government. This in turn rendered Lviv, the former capital of Galicia, a remote provincial backwater. At the same time, there must have been a clash of cultures in the new Polish capital. The earlier inhabitants of Warsaw (as we have seen) had a very unpleasant experience in the elections to the Russian State Duma. Would these experiences carry over to Polish politics in an ostensibly Polish state?

Indeed, few Poles knew what to expect from the new Poland. In a novel by Stefan Żeromski, The Spring to Come, the reality of life in a state experiencing growing pains is brought to life. A Polish industrialist in what was then the Russian imperial port of Baku tries to interest his son (the main protagonist of the novel), who had lived his entire life outside of the homeland, in moving to Poland. The father weaves a beautiful story of Poland as a land of glass houses and does convince his son to try his luck in the new Poland. However, this useful fiction of glass houses—a place of perfection, a promised land—proved but a bubble that soon would burst. There were no glass houses. Rather, the reality of life in the young state proved challenging at best.

Of course, no one in 1924 knew what a normal nation-state was to look like, let alone how to create one in this heterogeneous part of the world. There were various ideas as to Poland’s future shape as well. Various political camps had their own visions and mobilized their constituencies to fight to turn them into reality. The Roman Catholic clergy most decidedly had its own ideas of the role the church was to play in Polish life. Peasants sought improved conditions for farming, as well as greater access to land—something that was more easily accomplished by expropriating non-Poles than by doing the same to Polish nobles.

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by Joel | 3 August 2025 · 6:11 am

Poles in Japan vs. Russia, 1904

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 526-528:

In 1904 war broke out between Russia and Japan. As odd as it may seem, the clash with its tiny Asian neighbor proved troublesome for the Russians. The war effort led to problems at home and provided new opportunities, and new challenges, for the Poles of the Russian Empire.

The hostilities provided impetus for the Poles (always on the lookout for opportunity in the international arena) to plot. Both Piłsudski and Dmowski made their way to Tokyo, independently of each other, and each with a different agenda. Piłsudski offered the Japanese Polish military services; his men would fight the Russians on their home front, thus helping Japan win the war. Dmowski came to warn the Japanese against taking up Piłsudski’s offer; he expected that the war might compel the Russians to make concessions to the Poles. While the double visit might have been seen as a comedy of errors (the two men actually met while in Tokyo, discussed their respective views, and respectfully chose to differ), the fact that the bemused Japanese were willing to hear each side suggests the Poles were being treated as if they were genuine players in the international realm, and not subjects of Russia. And, although they declined to use the Poles to fight, the Japanese general staff did provide Piłsudski with some money and war materièl in the hopes he might gather intelligence for them.

The Revolution of 1904–1907

In the meantime the Russo-Japanese War continued, increasingly showing the weakness of the eventual loser, Russia. This weakness had repercussions for the Poles of the empire. The diplomatic efforts of Piłsudski and Dmowski notwithstanding, the events of 1904 and beyond would be more noteworthy for the upheaval and bloodshed they engendered. In the fall of that year, a working-class demonstration broke out in Warsaw’s Grzymułtowski Square in which Piłsudski’s PPS fighters (some sixty strong) defended the crowds against the Russian police and mounted Cossacks. A number of participants were injured, while over four hundred were arrested and six lost their lives—as did one Russian policeman. This was the first armed clash between Poles and Russians since 1863….

Back in the Polish lands, strikes in places such as Warsaw and Łódź raised the specter of revolution; martial law was declared. Poles were becoming radicalized, especially the Polish workers, many of whom lost their jobs as a result of the economic decline brought on by the war.

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Filed under Japan, labor, nationalism, Poland, Russia, war

by Joel | 2 August 2025 · 8:57 am

Rebuilding a Polish Nation in Galicia

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 504-507:

Unlike the Hohenzollerns of Prussia/Germany or the Romanovs of Russia, the Habsburgs were Roman Catholic monarchs—and this is an important distinction. Furthermore, Habsburg piety was proverbial. All this meant that there should have been more common ground between the Poles and Austrians. At the same time, the Habsburgs had historically been the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (defunct as of 1806) and thus had a special relationship to the Germans of the rest of Europe.

As in all the partitions, the treatment of the new subjects was uneven. In the beginning, the Austrian authorities sought to civilize what they considered to be a backward land. Later, under the oppressive influence of Metternich, they sought to constrain what they thought was a revolutionary people—as witnessed in the debacle of the peasant jacquerie of 1846. (The incorporation of the Free City of Kraków into Galicia set the relatively thriving medieval capital of Poland back decades.) Metternich had seen fit to equate Polonism with revolution. Doubtless the new ruler of the Austrian Empire, Franz Joseph, felt similarly.

Only after a period of absolutism and Germanization did the tone change. This was brought about by several Austrian military defeats. The loss to the French in 1859 led to reforms at home that ultimately resulted in constitutional rule in Austria as of the early 1860s. Notably for the Poles, they were allotted their own provincial Seym as early as 1861.

The defeat of Austria by Prussia in 1866 was even more significant. The defeat forced the Habsburgs to reach a new modus vivendi with the Hungarians, who had been chafing under Habsburg rule particularly since the end of their failed revolution of 1848–1849. In 1867, the two parties reached the famous compromise that led to the establishment of the Dual Monarchy. Henceforth, the country would be known as Austria-Hungary.

That the Habsburgs had been compelled to make concessions to one of their subject peoples was a fact not lost on the Poles. Already the failure of the January Insurrection under Russian rule led some important Galicians to reconsider their approach to the Habsburg monarchy. A new and influential group known as the Kraków Conservatives resolved to be loyal to the Habsburgs. Although initially skeptical, after several years the Polish elites of Galicia were won over to this idea. Even the defeat of Austria at the hands of Prussia did not shake their belief in the monarchy.

…

These developments led to a third, and most fruitful, phase for the Galician Poles. Unlike the disgruntled Czechs of Bohemia, Poles decided to participate in the Reichsrat or imperial council, a two-chambered parliament in Vienna. Polish elites sought to recast Galicia as a conciliatory, conservative, loyal province. All this boded well for the position of Poles within the Habsburg Empire. Indeed, during the Dual Monarchy, a number of Poles actually came to hold important posts in the imperial government, including that of prime minister.

Given a degree of autonomy, Galicia became a haven for the Poles—a place where Poles could be Poles while still being loyal to the Habsburg dynasty. This dual identity was facilitated by Article 19 of the Fundamental Laws, which specified that each people within the monarchy had the right to cultivate its own nationality and language. Poles, and especially the democrats who vied with the conservatives for influence within the province, availed themselves of this opportunity in various ways, including the celebrating of a series of national figures and historic anniversaries. Among the most noteworthy were the solemn reburial of the poet Adam Mickiewicz in the Wawel crypts in 1890 and the five-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald in 1910, also celebrated in Kraków. The Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski had commissioned a massive monument commemorating that great medieval battle. These large public celebrations helped to bring Poles from all three partitioned lands closer together.

Thus, in the last third of the nineteenth century, the best place to be a Pole—certainly if one wanted to be politically active—and unlike in the Prussian or German lands, politically active in Polish—was Galicia. One could breathe Polish air there—or, as was also remarked, the very stones spoke Polish. To be sure, in Vienna (in the Reichsrat) Poles used German for their interpellations. However, back in the province, in the Galician Seym, the Polish language ruled (although it should be noted that Ruthenian interpellations during the proceedings were written down, phonetically, in Latin—not Cyrillic—script). Polish nonetheless became the language of government, the language of schooling.

Galician Poles had a high degree of autonomy—all of which allowed them to school themselves in the art of governance, to work in the bureaucracy, to develop scholarly institutes and universities where Polish would be the language of instruction, and the like. They lived in a country in which they had parliamentary representation and the rule of law. This, combined with the rights of nationalities, suggests that, as of the last third of the nineteenth century, one might think of Galicia as the closest thing to a Piedmont that the Poles had (Piedmont, meaning the Italian province that initiated Italian unification in the 1860s). Could these advantages within Galicia, thus, help propel the Poles to their own unification?