A representative assembly was set up in Lwów (now Lemberg) in 1817, but it was hampered by an army of administrators. These administrators also encouraged antagonism between the Poles and the Ukrainian and Jewish inhabitants, who between them made up about half of the population of 3.5 million. The Jews suffered cruelly as a result of mass conscription into the Austrian army, as this forced them to sin by wearing uniforms that mixed wool with cotton and to eat non-kosher food. Reforms in peasant-landlord relations hardly improved the status of the peasant and managed to bind both parties in a complicated system of fiscal and legal obligations which soured relations between them.
In 1841 a group of wealthy landowners led by Leon Sapieha founded a Land Credit Society, followed in 1844 by a Savings Bank and a Technical Academy, and in 1845 by a Galician Economic Association, but when at his instigation the Lemberg Assembly asked Vienna for permission to explore the possibility of reforming manor-cottage relations, it met with refusal. The Austrian chancellor Metternich was not inclined to allow cooperation between the Polish elites and the peasants. Austrian policy was revealed in all its cunning in 1846, when the Governor of Galicia, Count Stadion, incited the peasants against their landlords. That year even the unthreatening Lemberg Assembly was abolished. In 1848 Austria granted personal freedom and the possession of land to the peasants, and at the same time began to foster a national movement among the Ukrainians of eastern Galicia to undermine Polish influence there.
Martial law imposed after the disturbances of 1848 remained in force until 1854. The appointment of a Polish governor, Agenor Gołuchowski, was little more than a piece of window-dressing, since he was a loyalist trusted in Vienna. But things began to change in 1859. Austrian defeats in Italy signalled the beginning of a protracted crisis that would transform the structure of the Habsburg monarchy. Taking advantage of the situation, the Poles carried out their own reforms and by 1864 they had forced Austria to grant autonomy, with their own Sejm, a Polish viceroy to represent the emperor, and the right to send deputies to the Reichsrat in Vienna, in which they held some 15 per cent of the seats. Polish became the official language of Galicia, and education was left in the hands of the Lemberg Sejm. The addition of the former Republic of Kraków, abolished by Austria in 1846, added substance to the province and enriched it culturally.
For the next fifty years the inhabitants of Galicia were allowed to rule themselves. They also supplied more than their fair share of ministers and even prime ministers—Alfred Potocki, Kazimierz Badeni, Agenor Gołuchowski junior, Julian Dunajewski and others—to the Vienna cabinet. The wealthy szlachta of Galicia were supported by an influential conservative intelligentsia, and together they managed to keep more radical elements under control. They operated within the bounds imposed, concentrating their patriotic efforts on areas such as education.
In economic terms, Galicia was the most backward of the Polish lands. Great estates continued to operate on traditional lines, while tiny farms barely supported large peasant families. This caused unrest and led, in 1895, to the foundation of a Peasant Party, which brought about a strike of farm workers in 1902. It also caused waves of emigration to the United States, which eased conditions in the villages (the money sent back by the emigrants in the early 1900s has been calculated as $50 million per annum). The large Jewish population was particularly vulnerable, and many of the shtetls in which they lived were sinks of poverty. The establishment of industries was hampered by competition from the Austrian empire’s well-established industrial province of Bohemia. The only exceptions were coalmining and oil drilling. Oil was struck at Borysław in 1850, and by 1910 Galicia was the largest single producer in the world, with 5 per cent of the world market. But this was as nothing to the development achieved in the Russian partition.
Russia’s Polish problem was more extensive and more crucial to its own internal affairs than was the case with either of the other two powers, and it offered a wider range of solutions. One was to incorporate all the Polish lands into the empire outright. Another was to leave them as a semi-autonomous unit which could be kept loyal by the promise that at some stage in the future a war against Prussia or Austria would lead to the recovery of Poznania and Galicia.