In 1918, J. & P. Coats Ltd of Paisley, the Scottish multinational thread manufacturers, were faced with the loss of one of the major components of their European empire: the Russian operation controlled through the Nevsky Thread Manufacturing Company of St Petersburg, which on the eve of the First World War had accounted for some 90% of Russian thread production, and which had from the 1890s yielded large profits to the parent company. Of the 150 million strong Russian market, only the populations of Poland and the Baltic states (c. 10 million) were still accessible; and of Coats' six main manufacturing units in Russia, only two tattered remnants had – so far – escaped the Bolsheviks: the Strasdenhof mill at Riga, and the Łódzka Fabryka Nici T.A. at Łódź, now in the shakily-reborn independent Polish state. Radical readjustments were therefore required. We should note that in 1918 all decisions on the future of the Łódź mill rested with Paisley alone: J. & P. Coats Ltd, while maintaining the polite fiction of being ‘only shareholders’ in subsidiary companies, was a highly-centralised operation. Correspondence with the Łódź company may indeed have been conducted throughout in courtly language of suggestion and advice, but this was merely a gloss on a management structure in which all decisions on investment, production patterns, employment policy, supplies and sales (the last through Coats' marketing arm, the Central Agency) were taken from headquarters departments at Paisley.