ABSTRACT
All evidence suggests that neither Edward Briggs nor Ernst Posselt had visited Poland before January 1883 and it remains a matter of speculation whether they had considered and discounted other protectionist states such as the USA, Germany or France. But during 1882 the combined advantages of Russian-empire market demand, the lack of established worsted manufacturing, progressive protectionism and various other socio-political benefits, which will be outlined in this chapter, encouraged the venture capitalists that Russian Poland would be an ideal location for their foreign direct investment. The optimal site within the target nation would undoubtedly be dictated by land, labour and resource availability, but existing distributions of industry, transport infrastructure and particularly water supply were also vital to determine the feasibility of industrial locations. During the dramatic industrial expansion of the Kingdom of Poland it is clear that differing priorities led some new businesses to favour clusters of enterprise while others chose isolated sites. General scholarship of industrialisation in Poland and Russia tends to focus on cotton manufacture as, by the end of the nineteenth century, this sector had the largest plants and was Russia’s principal industrial employer. Although this chapter will focus on the practical and logistical requirements of a worsted-manufacturing enterprise, it will explore the opportunity that cotton’s dominance in the region constituted for the Briggs-Posselt partnership.
