The Politics of Business: (Failed) Economic Initiatives of Slovene Liberals in the First Decades of the Twentieth Century

Ivan Smiljanić

Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 4 (2024): 559-574 DOI 10.38145/2024.4.559

Slovenian politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was strongly divided along ideological lines, with the conservative and liberal camps in particular engaging in never-ending cultural struggles through their various outlets. This was also evident in the economic sphere, where the conservative camp held a strong position with a network of cooperatives across the predominantly agricultural areas of Slovenia. The liberal camp tried to gain greater influence and also founded a number of cooperatives in order to exert greater economic and thus also political influence. For reasons such as rashness, inexperience, negligence, and outright corruption, these projects were mostly unsuccessful and ended in a series of bankruptcies or financial scandals.

Keywords: economic nationalism, Slovenia, liberals, Kulturkampf, bankruptcy

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Živnostenská Banka (Trades Bank) and Its Participation in the Banking Consortia/Syndicates of Interwar Czechoslovakia

Eduard Kubů and Barbora Štolleová

Charles University

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 4 (2024): 533-558 DOI 10.38145/2024.4.533

One of the characteristic features of the development of the Czechoslovak economy in the interwar period was its progressive concentration and increasing organization, whether initiated from above (the persistence of a higher degree of state interventionism) or from below in the sense of voluntary cooperation and clustering across the business environment. In addition to the traditional associations for carrying out business, such as joint-stock companies, public companies, limited liability companies, and others, which were legal entities and were usually established for an unlimited period of time, new instruments of cooperation were becoming more and more common. These were networks of cartels, conventions, gentlemen’s agreements, and syndicates which restricted the free market. The study sheds light on characteristic forms of bank-to-bank cooperation, namely consortia/syndicates, using the example of the largest and most important Czechoslovak bank of the interwar period, Živnostenská Banka pro Čechy a Moravu v Praze (the Trades Bank for Bohemia and Moravia in Prague). It points out the relatively large number of consortia and offers a typology derived from their functions.

Keywords: banking consortium/syndicate, Czechoslovakia, interwar period, Živnostenská Banka (Trades Bank)

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The Incomes and Expenditures of Agrarian Family Enterprises in Interwar Hungary

Róbert Bagdi

University of Debrecen

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 3 (2024): 471-508 DOI 10.38145/2024.3.471

Hungarian statistics in the era of the Dualism and the Interwar period did not go below the settlement level and did not provide any information on the number of livestock and the income from them. Therefore, we do not have exact data on the main problem of the period – whether the large estates or the smallholding showed better yield/ha values, and on the minimum viable size of small farms. Although the movement of ethnographic writers has depicted a dark overview of many settlements, in most cases these do not provide quantifiable data. The surveys organised by the OMGE or the agricultural schools provided statistically relevant quantitative data on certain layers of the peasantry, but the poorest, daily wage-earners remained under-represented in the studies. Therefore, sources that record the incomes and expenditures of these strata in detail (which is the focus of agricultural economists), together with their living conditions (which is the focus of the village researchers’ movement), is particularly valuable. At the University of Debrecen, under the supervision of Rezső Milleker, professor of geography, dozens of theses were written on this topic - though not all of them were conducted according to the professors’ pre-written guidance. In this paper, we try to shed light on the distribution of income and expenditure of the smallholder-peasant class, which was also hit by the recession of the Great Depression, by analysing one of the best, but unpublished work. Beside revenue sources, strategies of survival, techniques of tax-evasion, the profits compared to loan interests are also discussed.

Keywords: smallholders, farm profitability, tax, loans, peasant account books, Interwar Hungary, demographic conditions

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The Export Potential of Hungarian Agriculture and the Issue of Added Value between the two World Wars

András Schlett

Pázmány Péter Catholic University

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 3 (2024): 446-470 DOI 10.38145/2024.3.446

This study presents developments concerning Hungarian agricultural exports during a period when the production structure changed significantly and the international agricultural market changed fundamentally. As a result of the Treaty of Trianon, the market and logistic networks developed over the previous centuries had changed significantly, and new actors came to play increasingly prominent roles in trade relations in the Danubian Basin. Hungary, with its small consumer market but significant agricultural potential, had been fundamentally dependent on the value of its agriculture produce on foreign markets. However, the reorganization of the international market quickly brought to the surface the contradictions and structural imbalances of Hungary’s massive agricultural production. Analyses of the agricultural history of the past century repeatedly revealed the problematic nature of the low value-added production of Hungarian agriculture.

Keywords: Hungary, agriculture, trade, export potential, added value

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Agricultural Productivity in the Western Borderlands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Second Half of the Sixteenth Century)

Maciej Kwiatkowski
University of Bialystok
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ORCID: 0000–0001–8889–8086

 Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 3 (2024): 431-445 DOI 10.38145/2024.3.431

The purpose of this article is to determine the grain yields in the royal manors of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 16th and 17th centuries. The manorial system in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania appeared with the land reform in the mid-16th century (Volok Reform), when the three-field system was introduced here. However, there were far fewer manor farms in Lithuania than in Poland, but they were very large. Most of them produced grain for export based on peasant labor force. The inventories of the royal estates give account on the seed demand and yields of the most important cereals: rye, oats and wheat. The analysis of more than a dozen manors showed varying yields in Lithuanian estates (Grodno Starosty, Brest Ekonomy and Kobrin Ekonomy), which were due to natural environmental conditions, as well as elemental disasters or human activity.

Keywords: grain yield, productivity, 16‒17th-century Lithuania, volok reform, manors

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The Share of Tithe Paid to Parish Priests in Sixteenth-Century Transylvania: A Topographical Approach

Géza Hegyi
Transylvanian Museum Society; HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 3 (2024): 403-430 DOI 10.38145/2024.3.403

The most important source of income for the medieval Latin Church, the tithes paid by lay people from their crops and livestock, was divided between several levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The set of beneficiaries varied from one country or diocese to another, while the proportions essentially from one locality to another. In the Transylvanian diocese, the bishop (or the chapter) got the substantial part of the tithe (half to three quarters), while the archdeacon, as regional magistrate, uniformly received a quarter. Despite the canon law standards, in many cases only a fraction of the quarta remained to supply the parish priest. On the other hand, the parish priests from the deaneries of royal Saxons (i. e. German settlers) could usually keep the full tithe.
The aim of my research is to reconstruct the share of tithe of the Transylvanian parish clergy by locality, to map it and to analyze the spatial inequalities thus revealed. Due to the unilateral source endowments, we have only a few direct data on this, so I calculated indirectly the size and proportion of the priestly share, based on the data of a list from 1589, which only gives the local rents of the bishops and the archdeacons’ share of tithe. According to my results, the inhabitants of 1239 localities paid tithes in mid-sixteenth century Transylvania. For 457 settlements (mostly in the Székely Land) we do not know the share of the priest. In the known cases, the three most common distributions were when the local priest received no tithe (35%), a quarter of the tithe (36%) or the whole tithe (25%). The spatial distribution of the parishes with quarta was not uniform, but rather concentrated in some small areas due to various historical reasons. The level of priestly share correlated with secular and ecclesiastical privileges, the ethnicity of the population that paid the tithe, and the person of the landlord.
These results can provide important aspects for the interpretation of sources based on priestly income, such as the papal tithe register of 1332–1336, fundamental to the history of medieval Transylvania.

Keywords: Transylvania, tithe, parish priest, distribution, quarta, Saxons

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