I sit as I write this by a window in my rooms at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, with a fine evening view of the central market square below. It is the start of my second year as a Fellow in Economics at the College, a position I entered into immediately after finishing my PhD in Economic History at the London School of Economics. I teach here on the Economics Tripos, but my research work remains on the financial history of the interwar period. My current research project is a book charting the development of Polish monetary policy between 1918 and 1939, including the strategic and geopolitical motivations for Poland’s monetary policy decisions: a subject that has unfortunately become very relevant once again due to the war in Ukraine.
My six years at the LSE, from 2015 to 2021, were critical to my path to becoming a practicing economic historian. I came to London fresh out of an Oxford BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, which I had entered wanting to become a pure economist (indeed, so pure that when my perfectionism would take over I would tell myself that I would take a break from work when I got a call from Stockholm telling me I’d won the Nobel Prize) and left having undergone a crisis of faith in the incuriosity toward history I found in the core parts of my course there, abetted by the inevitable burnout from swearing to take no rest until I had gotten the Nobel.
My introduction to economic history as an alternative, more grounded and more promising approach to doing economics came during my year of recovery from burnout. One of the frustrations that had tipped me over the edge into disillusionment came in my second year of Microeconomics, when I was presented in the lectures with two models of the breakdown of oligopolies. Both were equally logical and mathematically rigorous—yet the two reached diametrically opposite conclusions, with no apparent way within the toolkit of ‘pure’ economics I had been given to favour the one over the other. The revelation came when I was reading a copy of Chandler’s The Visible Hand pilfered from my father’s book collection: in describing the collapse of the US railroad cartels in the 1870s, Chandler was providing clear evidence of a circumstance in which one of the two models applied! (Indeed, I later learned that the railroad price and route wars of the 1870s were a major inspiration for said model—something that had not at all been mentioned in the lectures.) It was at that point that, to the delight of my macroeconomics tutor Brian A’Hearn and the chagrin of my microeconomics tutor George Bitsakakis (who saw in me a promising young theorist), I decided to commit myself to studying economic history and seeing how far I could get with it.
Having thus resolved within myself, I needed a direction for my future research, and interwar Poland suggested itself for several reasons. A glib one is that I am Polish, which puts me in a very good position to make use of Polish-language archives and publications: the language barrier has certainly been a major reason why Poland has been so under-studied in the economic history literature, though it is quite impressive how far my co-author, whose Polish is limited, has been able to get using OCR and Google Translate! More fundamentally, I noticed that the Polish case was notable by its near-absence in the existing literature, such as Eichengreen’s seminal Golden Fetters, an early ‘Bible’ that I gradually outgrew. From family recollections and open-access GDP data from the Maddison Project, I knew that this was a major omission, that in fact the Polish Great Depression was among the most severe in Europe if not the entire world. Here, then, was a major unanswered question, and this is what I made it my mission while at the LSE to shed light on.
The beginnings of the project, during my year as a Masters student, were a little bumpy. The idea behind a Masters dissertation at the LSE is to make a modest, data-driven contribution to a well-defined area of study and debate. The Polish economy between the wars, however, was hardly ‘well-defined’: the English-language literature, with a few exceptions such as the very useful contributions of Nikolaus Wolf, paid this case little notice, and even the Polish scholarship, active during the 1960s, had largely petered out by the 1980s, meaning that there was a great deal to be done simply setting out the fundamentals of Poland’s macroeconomic experience in the language of modern economic theory. There was no room in the thesis, within the few months that I had to write it, for even a preliminary data analysis, and the examiners were a little perplexed by it; nevertheless, it probably could not have been done otherwise and I continued on into the PhD.
The dissertation, though I cannot for reasons of space go into all the details of how it came together, is what made me the independent, confident scholar I am today. From the initial two years of meticulous data collection, through the effort to refine the analysis in the light of this data, to the final writing-up, the Department was tremendously supportive, offering a great deal of helpful advice through the graduate seminars, workshops, and GRC process, and helping to set me on the right course and mend frayed nerves through the dedicated work of my two supervisors, Albrecht Ritschl and Max-Stephan Schulze. I discovered that Poland’s economic struggles during the Great Depression were mostly the product of the deep Polish unwillingness to abandon the gold standard even at the cost of accepting severe austerity and painful tariffs, and that this unwillingness could ultimately be traced back to Poland’s dependence, military even more than economic, on the last major country to leave gold, France. The process of researching and writing was difficult, but very rewarding, and while there were times, particularly during the pandemic, when the work got off the rails, my supervisors were there to get it going again and push it toward the finish line. For this and for all the other ways the LSE made my writing of the PhD possible and launched my research career, I am deeply grateful.