WHO OWNS THE LAND, OWNS THE COUNTRY? LAND TENURE AND GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF THE ARISTOCRATIC LORD-LIEUTENANTS’ IN DUALIST-ERA HUNGARY

• Authors: Pál Judit
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The study examines the evolution of the proportions of the aristocrats in a well-defined group within the political elite in dualist-era Hungary, the lord-lieutenant corps, and the reasons behind it. It explores the territorial distribution of aristocratic lord-lieutenants and the role of land ownership in this context. This involves investigating the extent to which the land structure correlated with the proportion of aristocratic lord-lieutenants. It also analyses the extent of land ownership among these lord-lieutenants, the size and temporal changes of estates and how their land holdings correlated with the counties they were appointed to lead. The proportion of aristocrats did not show any significant correlation with the land structure (in terms of overall large estates, aristocratic large estates, or estates over 100 acres), the proportion of different ethnicities, or the spatial distribution of the titled persons. The aristocratic lord-lieutenants’ landholdings underwent however significant changes during the dualist period. While at the beginning of the era, one-third of them had landholdings over 10,000 acres, by the turn of the century, only a few of them retained such extensive estates, and increased the number of smaller landowners. The lord-lieutenants still formed the most conservative group within the political-administrative elite, and they largely preserved their homogeneity.

Keywords

EN

LORD-LIEUTENANTS; ARISTOCRATS; LANDHOLDING; ESTATES; DUALIST-ERA; HUNGARY

• Publisher: Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Historický časopis (Historical Journal)
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 71
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 433 – 472

Contributors

author

Pál Judit

• Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Gabčíkova 2362/10, 182 00 Prague 8, Czech Republic

• https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7935-6787

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/histcaso.2023.71.3.3