Jewish Businessmen and Businesswomen in the Shoemaking Industry in the Bohemian Lands until the End of the First World War
Jewish Businessmen and Businesswomen in the Shoemaking Industry in the Bohemian Lands until the End of the First World War

Summary/Abstract: In the middle of the 19th century, the first shoemaking factories began to spring up in the Bohemian lands. Their founders were almost exclusively Jewish businessmen. Until the end of the First World War and the post-war rise of the Zlín giant Baťa, Jewish entrepreneurs were the leading force behind the footwear industry, which was belatedly industrialized in the years around the First World War. The road to the forefront of industrial shoe production before 1918 led through generational Jewish involvement in leather processing and through entrepreneurship in the industrial production of textiles, technologically related to the footwear industry. This study focuses on the long-term trajectories that led Jewish entrepreneurs to industrial shoe production from the mid-19th century to the first quarter of the 20th century. It further examines female entrepreneurs in footwear manufacturing and trade, and the watershed era of the Great War, when most of the shoe joint-stock companies, again Jewish-owned, were constituted.

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