Talk on C19 land reform
On 29 February, PhD candidate Rob Gray presented the subject of his doctoral thesis, land reform in early nineteenth-century Hungary.
Paraszt és úr
Rob began with an overview of the ideology of reform. Part reaction to economic stagnation and the dreaded nemzethalál (‘national death’), part critique of feudal society, reformers sought to revitalise the nobility and, by extension, the country. Here, land reform was key to modernisation plans, which also entailed forms of land redistribution and agricultural capitalisation, together with labour liberalisation. Lord-peasant relations affected almost everything in Hungarian society; changes to the nature of property rights, implied by a more inclusive concept of the nation and a solution to the ‘peasant question’, however, had to be carefully managed from above. For the reform-minded nobility, no less urgent was the fear of revolution from below.
The political changes and economic crisis of the 1830s were read in conjunction with Széchenyi’s Hitel (Credit, 1930), turbulent relations with Vienna, and increased contact with the West through travel, and the circulation of Enlightenment ideas, in particular Bentham’s utilitarianism and the works of Voltaire, translated (probably) by anonymous Jacobins. The word feudális had, necessarily, pejorative connotations, when it was first used in 1791. We concluded that the debates between lawyers over feudalism versus polgári társadalom (bourgeois, civil society) bore certain similarities to the népi-urbánus vita, which occupied the reform generation of the twentieth-century interwar period.
Rob went on to discuss the roles of érdekegyesítés, the widening of the concept of rights, and the concept of kifejlődés, in efforts to convince the nobs of the need for reform; outlined changes to the ways in which property was acquired or inherited; and noted that in 1849, the franchise of eligible men stood at 20% in Hungary, and only 4-5% in England.