New atlas of Poland

This article presents Eugeniusz Romer’s Geographical-Statistical Atlas of Poland, conceived during the First World War in response to Poland’s political partition and the resulting fragmentation of knowledge about its historical territories. The atlas aimed to reconstruct traces of former unity, measure the divergent effects of more than a century of Austrian, Prussian, and Russian rule, and demonstrate the demographic, cultural, and economic potential of the Polish lands considered as a whole. Covering historical Poland within its 1772 borders and adjacent regions with substantial Polish populations, the completed work comprised 65 maps on 32 sheets, accompanied by explanatory texts. Its four sections addressed physical and political geography; population, religion, education, and intellectual culture; landownership, agriculture, and livestock; and mining, industry, transportation, and cooperative credit. Romer’s principal challenge was to integrate statistical materials produced at different dates and according to incompatible administrative categories and survey methods. Wherever possible, counties served as the common cartographic unit. Missing or incomparable data were handled through explicit estimates, conversion coefficients, graphical classification, and cross-checking. The most difficult case was industry: Austrian and Prussian censuses recorded workers and machinery across enterprises of all sizes, whereas Russian statistics emphasized output value and largely covered major factories. Romer therefore derived conversion keys linking production value to worker numbers and large-industry employment to total industrial employment. He estimated the probable error at about 10 percent, rising to 25 percent in extreme cases, while arguing that graphical representation reduced its practical impact. The project relied on extensive collaborative and institutional labor, including thousands of agricultural observations, the accounts of over 6,000 credit societies, and data on more than 127,000 Polish publications. Methodologically, Romer criticized conventional choropleth maps for assigning averages to historically contingent and physiographically heterogeneous administrative areas. He introduced interpolation and lines of equal statistical value, termed “isarythms,” to reveal anthropogeographical patterns more clearly, while retaining county seats as reference points for administrative interpretation. The first installment mapped historical boundaries, administration, population density and growth, Polish and religious distributions, Jewish settlement, landownership, education, publishing, and the press; later installments treated physiography, agriculture, and economic activity. The atlas thus combined national documentation with methodological innovation. It offered evidence for evaluating wartime losses and partition-era transformations, while providing a foundation for broader research into the historical routes through which material and intellectual culture spread across the Polish lands.