ABSTRACT
For the duration of the Marki venture, from 1883 to 1939, it is evident that the British owners operated in a climate of perpetual political volatility which would culminate in a series of very significant social, political and national transformations at the beginning of the twentieth century. This chapter will consider whether the Briggs-Posselt partnership’s comprehensive strategy for worker control – their social-overhead investment and largely female workforce – successfully insulated the firm from the unrest which consumed Russian Poland at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will show how the rising politicisation of the working class fundamentally altered relations between leading industrialists and the state, forcing adjustments to their business behaviour in order to survive.
