The Grabski Tax Reform and Jewish Merchants: State Building in Interwar Poland

This article presents the financial overhaul and tax reform of the Polish Second Republic that occurred between 1924 and 1925 in order to show how the state expands, to what ends, and how society responds to this increase in state power. During this short period, we can observe the introduction of new policies and the strengthening of institutions. This reform program was based upon fundamental changes to the way that Poland taxed the economy, namely, relying much more on direct taxation that required interaction between citizens and their state. The state gathered information on business activity and demanded citizens surrender their income to the treasury. As the narrative below will display, taxing the society necessitated state building in the institutional sense, and the execution of these policies led to an expansion of state power in the minds of citizens as they were compelled to comply without a direct threat of coercion. But this was not without consequence. Citizens, especially Jewish merchants, reacted negatively to what was perceived as an unfair process of tax assessment and an outsized tax burden. Precisely at these moments of conflict between state and society, the state emerges and becomes legible. Building on earlier scholarship examining the ways in which states make their territory and citizens legible, this article also shows how the state becomes legible to its citizens.