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This paper presents KINGPOL_INDUSTRY, a relational database of industrial enterprises and business elites in the Kingdom of Poland, constructed from eight volumes of the privately published Address Book of Factory Industry in the Kingdom of Poland (1904–1911). Unlike state-centred sources such as RUSCORP, which records only formally incorporated corporations, KINGPOL_INDUSTRY captures the full operational stratum of industrial enterprise, including partnerships, family firms, and sole proprietorships, and integrates firm-level economic data with prosopographic and genealogical records in a single relational structure. This constitutes a self-portrait of an industrialising society, and the methodology is transferable wherever analogous autonomous business information infrastructures existed. Drawing on the database, the paper advances substantive arguments about the Kingdom’s industrial development, arguing that it occupied a semi-peripheral position, more concentrated and productive than most imperial regions, yet lagging the Western technological frontier, and identifies research directions the database opens, including sub-imperial comparison.
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Koryś et al. (2026) studied this question.
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