Crossing Borders by Land and Sea: Colonial Imaginings, Travel Writing, and the

Mapping-Out of Polishness
Lenny A. Urea

Escola So Paulo de Estudos Avanados sobre a

Globalizao da Cultura no Sculo XIX

The same year that the Brazilian parliament passed the Rio Branco Law (1871),
which freed the children born to slave women, a group of thirty-two Polish families
settled near Curitiba and founded a colony that later on began to be known as New
Poland.i Most of the settlers were peasants from the Prussian province of Silesia. They
had come to Brazil in order to escape harsh economic conditions, Germanization policies,
and diseases faced at home. After Brazil completely abolished slavery in 1888, many
more arrived in the region from the Polish Kingdom and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The number of Polish emigrants kept increasing in the following decades and this mass
migration came to be known as the Brazilian fever or the Brazilian plague in the
popular literature.ii Poles in general benefited from newly introduced Brazilian
immigration policies that sought to substitute the slave labor, modernize the means of
production, and whiten the nation by promoting the settlement of Europeans in the
country. By 1918, there were around 120,000 Poles established in Brazil, most of them in
the states of Paran, Rio Grande do Sul, and Santa Catarina.iii
My goal in this paper is to analyze this migration process as an example and
product of global colonialism in the nineteenth century. Rather than emphasizing the
economic aspects of this transatlantic movement, I am interested in examining the
cultural factors that made this Polish migration possible. In this essay, I study the
popularization of travel literature and its role in creating what Mary Louise Pratt has
deemed a domestic subject of Euroimperialism in the Polish partitions. I argue that the
publishing and translation of the works of European travelers in the Polish press,
especially those of French, British, and German explorers, played a significant role in
making ordinary Poles leave their homeland in search of a better future and in engaging
in colonial activities in overseas territories.iv Throughout the essay, I analyze the
connections between the works of Poles abroad and the main cultural and political issues

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Poles were facing in Europe to further our understanding of Polish colonial imagination
in Latin America.
The political conditions that Poles experienced in Europe, as a nationality without
a modern nation-state, have posed great challenges to the study of Polish participation in
the history of European colonialism. The lack of national sovereignty throughout the
nineteenth century has led many scholars to believe, until quite recently, that overseas
colonies and global colonialism did not play a central role in the making of Polish
subjectivity. If the colonial question is ever addressed in the historiography, especially in
the context of the German empire, it is mostly done to show how Poles were being
colonized in Europe, without questioning how invested they were in colonial projects. v
Nineteenth-century campaigns of assimilation and the equivalent of Orientalist discourses
have prevented many historians from studying Polish own engagement in colonial
agendas.vi Did colonies, postcolonial territories, and the representation of subordinated
others in distant lands ever influence the Polish national movement? To what extent did
news about Poles abroad help shape a national discourse back home? How and when did
the notion of Poland as an oppressed nation give way to the idea of Poland as a colony in
the imagining of nineteenth-century Polish intellectuals? And more importantly, how can
we measure the effects that colonial discourses and colonial works had on the general
Polish population?
From the 1860s on the number of periodicals published in Polish language
increased throughout the Polish partitions in response to higher literacy rates and
restrictions imposed, mainly by Russian and Prussian powers, on the use of Polish
language in schools and public places.vii Newspapers and journals grew in social and
political importance being often the weapons that members of the Polish intelligentsia
used to defend culture and language in spite of harsh censorship policies. According to
Piotr Wandycz, Between 1864 and 1894 the number of [Polish] periodicals increased
from 22 to 92 under Russian rule, from 15 to 45 under Prussia, and from 28 to 126 in
autonomous Galicia.viii Many newspaper editors developed networks that transcended
political borders and were able to diversify content to attract a large number of readers.
While in Prussia Poland literacy was almost universal by mid-nineteenth century, large
pockets of illiteracy still existed in Galicia and the Polish Kingdom. ix However, similar to

2
educational and readership trends in other European countries, Poles were becoming
progressively literate.
The periodicals that emerged in the field of literature and arts tended to include
articles written by European travelers who in the mid-nineteenth century set out to
rediscover the Americas, Africa, and Asia. An example worth mentioning here is
Wdrowiec (Wanderer), a weekly paper founded in Warsaw in 1863, whose main goal
was to inform Poles of explorations that were taking place in foreign lands. The title,
Wanderer, already suggests the global content and geographical leanings of the
newspaper reflecting the desires of its first editor Filip Sulimierski (1843-1885).
Sulimierski was himself a geographer and one of the principal sponsors of a Polish
expedition to Africa in 1883.x The scope of the newspaper was stated in the heading of
every yearly volume until 1885: A periodical covering travels and expeditions combined
with the description of habits and customs of foreign peoples; biographies of famous
foreigners; stories and examples of foreign literature; news from the natural sciences,
industry, and technology; miscellany; etc., etc. After Sulimierskis death the paper
started to give more emphasis to Polish literature without completely abandoning the
international aspect.
During great part of the nineteenth century, Wdrowiec translated the works of
important naturalists and explorers that appeared in the famous French travel journal,
Tour du Monde, as well as in other main British and German geographical journals. xi It
also featured articles by Polish travelers and scientific explorers who went to different
parts of the world, primarily to Africa and Latin America. These authors wrote on the
climate, nature, peoples, and animals of the places visited. By publishing their works,
Wdrowiec contributed in the development of a planetary consciousness in the Polish
lands and also helped in the popularization of traveling as an important modus vivendi of
European subjects.xii Ordinary Poles were now able to literally consume the world by
reading the travel experiences of fellow Europeans.
At the height of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, Polish
periodicals throughout the partitions often included news about European expeditions and
colonial endeavors in Africa and Asia. They also followed with great detail the mass
emigration of Poles to the Americas, especially to the United States and Brazil. Two main

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debates emerged in the press around the founding of Polish colonies in overseas
territories. One of them had to do with the afore-mentioned Polish expedition to Africa
organized by Stefan Szolc-Rogoziski (1861-1896) who sought to explore the lands of
Cameroon and found a colony there at a time when the territory did not officially belong
to any European power. The other one was about the Brazilian fever and Polish
migration in general. Dreams about founding a colony in Africa, which divided Polish
opinion at the time, ended up in a complete failure when Cameroon became a German
colony in 1884. Emigration to Brazil and the US was opposed by a large sector of Polish
society because the bulk of migrants were peasants who were seen as the foundation of
the Polish nation.
Although many people at the time broadly criticized the migration movement for
the terribly consequences it had on the home economy and the national cause, some
Polish nationalists still preferred the overseas migration to the continental one (i.e., to
other parts of Germany, Russia, and Southeastern Europe). They believed that
continental migration was detrimental to Polish identity because in Europe Poles could
still marry enemy elements (German or Russian) that would weaken the national
movement.xiii An observer explained the problem of emigration in the following manner:

Emigration by land to the West, to countries such as Germany and others, as well
as to the East, to Russia and the Balkan countries, is more pernicious than to the
overseas; it does poorly from the material point of view and in conserving the
national characters, dissolving it into atoms and disappearing principally with the
help of mixed marriages into foreign elements and, besides this, into hostile
Polish affair in general.xiv

It was then assumed that people in overseas colonies would avoid miscegenation
and remain loyal to Polish ethnicity. Therefore for many Polish nationalists at the end of
the nineteenth century the solution to the nationality question in Europe was the founding
of New Poland in the state of Paran. At the time, Brazil offered Poles what they were
longing for in Europe: a space where they could cultivate their Polishness and practice
their Catholic religion without being forced into German or Russian assimilation.

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 i
Kazimierz Guchowski, Z dziejw wychodstwa i osadnictwa polskiego w Brazylii, in Emigracja
polska w Brazylii: 100 lat osadnictwa (Warszawa: Ludowa Spdzielna Wydawnicza, 1971), 19-45; Edmund
Sebastian Wo Saporski, Pionerski lata, idem, 46-64; and Euzebiusz Basiski, Polonia solidarna z macierz:
Z dziejw wychodstwa polskiego (Warszawa: Ludowa Spdzielna Wydawnicza, 1971), 116-127.
ii
Krzysztof Groniowski, Gorczka brazylijska, Kwartalnik Historyczny LXXIV, no. 2 (1967): 317
341 and Agnieszka Mocyk, Pieko czy raj? Obraz Brazylii w pimiennictwem polskim w latach 18641939
(Krakw: Universitas, 2005).
iii
Statistical data vary greatly from source to source mainly because for most part of the nineteenth
century many Poles were being classified according to their citizenship and not their ethnic nationality. For an
account on Polish population numbers in Brazil, see Ks. Jzef Zajc, Liczba Polakw w Brazylii, in
Emigracja polska w Brazylii, 149-151.

iv
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York:
Routledge, 1992) 4.

v
See Kristin Kopp, Contesting Borders: German Colonial Discourse and the Polish Eastern Territories
(Ph.D. Diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2001) and Constructing Racial Difference in Colonial Poland,
in Germanys Colonial Pasts, eds. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 2005).
vi
By Orientalist discourses, I am referring to a set of West European literatures that tended to portray
East Europeans, among them Poles, as culturally backward and decadent. See Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern
Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Map of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
For a study of the Polish decline in the eyes of German thinkers, see David Pickus, Dying with an Enlightening
Fall: Poland in the Eyes of German Intellectuals, 17641800 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001).
vii
The Polish Kingdom fared the worst with censorship measures after the January Uprising (1863)
failed to achieve Polish national independence from the Russian empire. Polish language was banned in schools
and administrative offices. Literacy rate dropped dramatically as many Poles refused to learn Russia. Russian
Poles developed underground schools and relied on periodicals to keep the language alive. Prussia adopted
similar policies in its efforts to Germanize the Polish population. Poles under the Austrian empire enjoyed
political autonomy and Polish language was able to thrive.
viii
Piotr Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795-1918 (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1974) 264.
ix
Ted Kaminski, Polish Publicists and Prussian Politics (1890-1894) (Stuttgart: Franz Sterner Verlag,
1988) 1.

x
For further information on Suliemierskis involvement with the Polish expedition to Africa, see Lenny
A. Urea Valerio, The Stakes of Empire: Colonial Fantasies, Civilizing Agendas, and Biopolitics in the Prussian
Polish Provinces (Ph.D. Diss., University of Michigan, 2010).

xi
Micha Kabata, Warszawska batalia o nowa sztuk (Wdrowiec 1884-1887) (Warszawa: Pastwowy
Instytut Wydawniczy, 1978) 118.

xii
Pratt 15.

xiii
Dr. St. Kobukowski, W sprawie wychodztwa, Dziennik Poznaski, no. 189, 20 sierpnia 1889, p.2.
xiv
Ibid.