The Polish city of Łódź, famously transformed from a provincial village to a teeming industrial center in the middle of the nineteenth century, has long embodied the competing claims of modernity. Lying on the western edge of the tsarist empire, the city served as a window to the west, offering the promise of economic progress and capitalist competition, while reflecting the ills of urban blight, working-class destitution, and government neglect. In From Cotton to Smoke: Łódź—Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity, 1897–1994, a team of Łódź-based scholars explore the multiple tensions of modernization by looking at four major inflection points in the city's history: its sudden rise as a locus of textile production at the cusp of the twentieth century, its dominance as the industrial core of a nationalizing state after 1918, its short-lived status as an icon of socialist modernity, and its decline during the neo-liberalism of the post-communist era. The authors, who composed the chapters collectively, approach their study through an analysis of public sphere interactions, tracing the ways local journalists navigated competing discourses of modernity. Four richly textured chapters take us from the tsarist selection of Łódź as a cotton-weaving center in 1816, through the massive in-migration that made the city a multi-ethnic conglomerate, to the shaping of the “Polish Manchester” in the early years of national independence and its long desired “symbolic advancement” under state socialism, a status that declined by 1948 when resources were transferred to rebuilding Warsaw, as Łódź was left entirely out of the six-year plan of 1950–55. In the final transition after the collapse of communism, the city became an “orphan of neoliberalism,” abandoned by deindustrialization that left twenty percent of its workforce unemployed.

The insights in these depictions are fresh and original, making From Cotton and Smoke far more than a biography of a city. The book is rather an examination of the uneven pace of modernization and the ways journalists helped give meaning to these halting advancements. Approaching the city's changing fortunes through the paradigm of “asynchronous modernization,” the authors stress that development in the industrial realm was never matched by parallel progress in cultural life, municipal infrastructure, or consumer comforts. As a result, Łódź has long been viewed as a city of failed promise, a place driven by greed and immoral capitalism, where workers suffered at the hands of ruthless industrialists. Worse, Łódź was conceived as distinctly un-Polish, the playground of German and Jewish capitalists, with little connection to the country's rural heritage or noble past. From Cotton and Smoke contests this image by repositioning the city as emblematic of the ways Poland and the Poles have approached forward movement, demonstrating how modernity was constantly contested and renegotiated, perpetuated but never actually realized. The essays lie at the intersection of discourse analysis and modernization theory, incorporating temporal and spatial dimensions to assess the jagged pace of change while simultaneously exploring the shifting physical compartmentalization of urban functions. In the end, the multiple frames of analysis—temporal, spatial, ethnic, class—add to the richness of the presentation while occasionally splintering into a multiplicity of intersecting prisms. Ironically, in a city where the vast majority of industrial workers were female, gender analysis is relatively thin. More importantly, the narrative is skewed toward the Polish public sphere, emphasizing Polish language periodicals and the civic institutions they supported while neglecting German and Yiddish publications, thus missing the opportunity to consider cross-ethnic collaboration. The analysis also founders in its presentation of socialist-era periodicals, which necessarily became mouthpieces for the state and permitted little resistance from writers or working-class readers, a dynamic that is hard to square with the paradigm of open debate in the public sphere.

From Cotton and Smoke consistently challenges accepted truths about Łódź as a “failed city,” reveling in the robust debate between socialists and nationalists in the early Second Republic and touting advancements in culture and town planning during the socialist period, while ruing the marginalization of the workforce after 1989. Today's post-communist press, the authors conclude, has returned to its nineteenth-century practices. Gone are the ideological debates of the interwar period and the future oriented language of the postwar. Instead, local papers have raced to justify and decode ongoing changes without questioning them, a function that suggests a relatively weak public sphere. All of this reminds us that discussions about modernity are never far from the surface in today's Poland, which continues to maintain an uneasy relationship with its heritage of progress.