1918 and the Habsburg Monarchy as Reflected in Slovak Historiography

With regard to the “long” nineteenth-century history of the Habsburg monarchy, the new generation of post-1989 historians have strengthened research into social history, the history of previously unstudied social classes, the church, nobility, bourgeoisie, and environmental history, as well as the politics of memory.The Czechoslovak centenary increased historians’ interest in the year 1918 and the constitutional changes in the Central European region. It involved the culmination of previous revisitations of the World War I years, which also benefited from gaining a 100-year perspective. The Habsburg monarchy, whose agony and downfall accompanied the entire period of war (1914–1918), was not left behind because the year 1918 marked a significant milestone in Slovak history. Exceptional media attention and the completion of numerous research projects have recently helped make the final years of the monarchy and the related topics essential ones.Remarkably, with regard to the demise of the monarchy, Slovak historiography has focused not on “great” and international history, but primarily on regional history and its elites; on the fates of “ordinary” people living on the periphery, on life stories, and socio-historical aspects. The recognition of regional events that occurred in the final months of the monarchy and the first months of the republic is the greatest contribution of recent historical research. Another contribution of the extensive research related to the year 1918 is a number of editions of sources compiled primarily from the resources of regional archives. The result of such partial approaches is the knowledge that the year 1918 did not represent the discontinuity that was formerly assumed. On the contrary, there is evidence of surprising continuity in the positions of professionals such as generals, officers, professors, judges, and even senior old regime officers within the new establishment. In recent years, Slovak historiography has also managed to produce several pieces of work concerned with historical memory in relation to the final years of the monarchy.

The Finances of the Hungarian Aristocracy in Boom and Recession

Based on primary sources, the present study is intended to reconstruct and analyze the process and levels of indebtedness of some of the outstanding Hungarian aristocratic families possessing large landed properties in the western region of Hungary, mainly in the Transdanubian counties. The author provides exact numerical data on the changes of the registered amounts of credit transactions, the stocks of assets and liabilities of the princely line of the Esterházy, Batthyány and the Keszthely branch of the Festetics families at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He explores the various documents kept by the financial administrations of the families, including contemporary county mortgage records, which testify to an extremely lively lending and borrowing environment during the French Wars. The study concludes that devaluations and the financial crises of the Austrian Empire in the 1810s exerted an adverse effect on the finances of both the above families and contemporary ‘small investors’.

Weber’s ‘Ackerbürgerstadt’ in the Nineteenth Century

In his treatise “The City”, Max Weber introduced the concept of the Ackerbürgerstadt (agrarian city), a type of city whose economic system is primarily rooted in agricultural production. Since then, Weber’s concept has been frequently applied to historical studies on urban economies, especially in the Middle Ages and early modern history. However, by taking a closer look at the socioeconomic fabric of small towns in the prelude to industrialization, many characteristics of Weber’s Ackerbürgerstadt still seem to be applicable. The paper investigates the development of the economic system of the rural small town of Zwettl, situated in the northwestern part of Lower Austria. Zwettl and its surrounding region were left mostly untouched by economic progress. The city had one of the lowest growth rates in Lower Austria and was excluded from the infrastructural expansions of the industrial period. However, Zwettl did not dwindle into a remnant of pre-industrial times. Changes in the social and economic fabric happened on a more subtle level. Structural changes, for example in the agricultural sector, impacted long-term business opportunities, household management, and market development in Zwettl—for better or worse. The paper offers a case study-based examination of Weber’s Ackerbürgerstadt. It questions the rigid separation between urban and household economy, as well as the functional distinction between the city and its hinterland. Thus, the paper provides a contribution to the historical exploration of the socioeconomic development of small towns in the rural periphery.

Oesterreich ist eben Oesterreich

The study offers a comparative analysis of historical grand récits written during the period of the Austro–Hungarian Empire in the imperial center, Hungary and Bohemia. On the one hand, the study focuses on different strategies of legitimizing the existence of the empire from Austro-German historians and, on the other, on how compatible these historical visions were with those of Hungarian and Czech scholars. Rather than seeing “imperial” and “national” histories as isolated, by genre different narratives, our aim is to study them as community histories which have serious implications for each other: smaller (national) community histories for the larger (imperial) community, and vice versa. The study does not only rely on the analysis of these community histories, but aims to situate them in the larger context of the historical argumentation of the contemporary political discourse, as well as the central notions with which loyalty to Austria could be expressed. According to the conclusion of the study, there is no discernible common ground for Austro-German historians in terms of defining the mission and essence of Austria or even for basic notions describing the empire’s past. Also, their definitions of crucial notions such as the “nation” significantly contradicted the major Hungarian master narratives.

The Beginnings of the Cooperation of Free Royal Towns in the Kingdom of Hungary in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The study presents the possibilities and framework for cooperation between towns in Hungary through the operation of the Town League of Upper Hungary. The cooperation of towns in the Kingdom of Hungary happened primarily through regional relations. At first, the basis for cooperation was provided by common economic interests, but this area broadened considerably in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After the battle of Mohács (1526), the towns of Hungary became full members of the Hungarian Estates. The Kingdom of Hungary, which was part of the Habsburg Monarchy, gained considerable autonomy in internal politics. This was based on a compromise with the Habsburg rulers to ensure protection against the Ottoman Empire. The free royal towns were the least influential members of this country that had strong Estates. Nevertheless, cooperation between the towns became nationwide. The diets provided the forum for all free royal towns in the country to represent their common interests in a coordinated way. There are traces of this nationwide cooperation as early as the mid-sixteenth century, but it was from the early seventeenth century that it was the strongest. The reason was that in those decades state taxes were becoming heavier and more burdensome for towns. This nationwide cooperation was not only manifested in the field of taxation, but from the first quarter of the seventeenth century onwards, it increasingly extended to religious matters. In the background, there was the increasing recatholization of the Habsburg Monarchy. In this special matter, close links were forged also with the otherwise strongly anti-urban lower nobility.

The Hungarian Atlas of Historic Towns

This article surveys the work carried out in the past two decades on the Hungarian Atlas of Historic Towns in a Central European context. With its more than 550 atlases published in nineteen European countries in the last fifty years, the European Atlas of Historic Towns is one of the most comprehensive collaborative projects in the field of humanities. The countries of East Central Europe could join the project only after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Hungary published its first atlas as late as 2010. In four subsequent project phases, the Hungarian atlas team has been working on nineteen atlases of eighteen towns, out of which eight have been published so far. The editors follow the standards set by the International Commission for the History of Towns and have adopted best practices represented by the Austrian, Polish and Irish atlas series. In addition to describing the source basis and the main methodological concerns, the article highlights examples of comparative urban research for which the atlases offer an unparalleled potential. The article also advocates a more extensive use of this exceptional resource.