Socioeconomic developments
Historians have devoted considerable attention to socioeconomic developments in Austrian Galicia before 1848. Separated from the trade routes and markets of the Polish economic sphere of which it had been a part, the economic life of Galicia stagnated.
The Austrian government initially made some investments in the area, but soon decided that the province should remain an agricultural region that would supply food products to the rest of the empire while at the same time becoming a market for products from the more industrialized western provinces. Investments were not encouraged; industry was limited to a few ineffectual textile mills, iron works, glass works, and breweries; and the urban areas were neglected. As a result, Galicia became a kind of internal colony and the most economically depressed and backward area within the Austrian half of the empire.Agriculture declined as well. The Josephine reforms aimed at improving the status of the enserfed peasantry were short-lived or their intention distorted. Most of the land remained in the hands of Polish magnates and gentry, and peasant obligations remained in force. The situation was further aggravated by a rapid growth in population that could not be absorbed by a nonexistent industrial sector or by an agricultural sector that offered no credit and a decreasing amount of available land.
Agrarian conditions in eastern Galicia have been the special focus of attention in a collection of documents[306] and in general surveys of the period by Mykhailo Herasymenko and Evdokiia Kosachevskaia.[307] The effect on the peasantry of the Josephine reforms has been discussed in great detail in two monographs and a collection of documents by Roman Rozdol’s’kyi, while the domanial (demesne) and rustical (peasant) division of all land put into effect by the Austrians has been analyzed on the basis of lord/serf agreements from the period by Bronislaw Lozinski.[308]
The phenomenon of serfdom and the manner in which it changed between 1772 and 1848 are analyzed by Ludwig von Mises and Ivan Franko.[309] Soviet historians are particularly concerned with the reactions of the peasants to their plight: Fedir Steblii has traced peasant “rebellions” and the brigand movement in eastern Galicia during the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as the peasant uprising of 1846. This event, although based in Polish-inhabited areas of western Galicia during the early spring of that year, nonetheless had repercussions in Ukrainian eastern Galicia as well, especially during the late spring and summer months.[310] The problem of serfdom in Galicia became an important issue in Polish revolutionary circles, especially after 1830, and this development as well as its impact on Ukrainians in eastern Galicia is the basis of extensive studies by Ostap Terlets’kyi and Ivan S.
Miller.[311]Developments in industry and the status of the working class throughout Galicia as a whole are treated in a general survey of the period by the Polish scholar Walentyna Najdus.[312] The city of L’viv has been given special attention, especially in the solid work of the Polish economic historian Stanislaw Ho- szowski.[313]There are also studies on the discrepancies between the legally defined social groups and the actual class structure of society, on metalwork artisans, on the role of granaries in the countryside, and on trade in the city of Brody.[314]