Early Years

Abstract

Michał Kalecki was born in the Polish manufacturing city of Łódź on the 22 June 1899, to Abram Kalecki, the owner of a wool-spinning mill, and his wife Klara (ne Segaila).1 Łódz at that time was a city of nearly a quarter of a million inhabitants. It had grown rapidly through the nineteenth century from a mere hamlet, with a population of 26,000 in 1860, to the second largest city in the Kingdom of Poland, as Russian Poland was called at the time, and the largest manufacturing centre of the Russian empire. The reason for its rapid growth was its strategic proximity to the main railway line from Berlin to Moscow that passed through the Polish capital, Warsaw. The opening of that railway line in the 1850s enabled the Łódź textile manufacturers to import cotton through the German port of Hamburg. The abolition of tariffs between the Polish Kingdom and the Russian Empire, following the 1830 revolution that ended the Kingdom’s autonomy, had already given Polish manufacturers access to the rapidly growing markets of the Russian Empire. The abolition of serfdom in the Polish Kingdom, after the failed national uprising of 1863, ‘liberated’ thousands of peasants from the land, making the manufacturing centres of the Kingdom a first resort for migrant labour.