No GNW (or “Peter goes South”)
- Thread starter alexmilman
- Start date
Honestly with Austria with good industry and politically stable they could match the Italians well enough and if war does come, I wonder if they don't have any other powers who would also be interested in kicking Italy's teeth in(mainly Ethiopia since I'd imagine they'd love to get the full territory of Eritrea and basically expell the Italians fully from the Red Sea, with approval of France who likely won't care about Italians getting weaker and further threatening their positions there)
In OTL both of them had been quite busy in dreadnought naval race but it is a little bit too early for this. Italy has a geographic advantage in blocking the Adriatics and Austria, with its serious reliance upon the maritime trade can’t ignore such a threat. OTOH, its army is not big and strong enough for a major campaign in Italy (“major” as in going all the way to the Rome or Milan forcing Italy to capitulate). So it is not a simple issue and a war, especially a prolonged one, is going to be costly even with the help of mighty Ethiopia (😉) which would hardly be able to project power to Europe or, to be realistic, to take a well-fortified naval base. Ethiopia got lucky once because the Italians stuck their neck getting in a disorderly fashion deep into its territory. An offensive campaign into their coastal territory population of which preferred them to the Ethiopians would be a completely different issue impossible without heavy artillery which they did not have, with their level of the logistics and with a desert now being at their back.
Then, Austria is not completely problem-free: I just had to finish the chapter before fully finishing with Austria but will continue.
Of course, even ITTL going against Austria would be a risky, to put it mildly, idea for Italy but this is what the arms race is for.
“The Belt” #2
321. “The Belt” #2
Of course, while Vienna was beautiful and its coffee houses were just great, it did not mean that the empire was trouble free. And the main source of the internal troubles was Czechia. The lands of the Bohemian Crown were extremely important economically but, formally, they were just absorbed into the Austrian Empire with FJI not even bothering to get crowned by the Crown of Saint Wenceslas [3]. The Czechs had been represented in the imperial Reichstag and using the Czech language was legalized but, nonetheless, Czechia was something of a second class entity within the Empire and this was causing a considerable resentment. Rather fortunately for the monarchy, the nationalist parties had at least as strong dislike of each other as of the “Austrian oppression”.
The main Czech parties were:
Hungary.
Being a close neighbor of the RE and occupying a strategic position on the Danube and between the Austrian and Ottoman empires, Hungary. would warrant a serious Russian attention even without the close family connection of its ruling family.
Hungary was the main food supplier for the Austrian Empire. Hungary had strategically important national resources (iron, copper, lead, gold, sulfur, etc.) in Slovakia and Transylvania and well-developed mining and metallurgical industries. As a result, the interest was not only on a geopolitical but also economic level. There was also a considerable commonality: both countries were still in a process of the intensive industrialization with the agricultural sector (and its export) still playing a very important role. Both countries were modernizing their agriculture and existing experience was of a mutual interest.
Of course, there were good and bad years but the national income was growing on average 3.8% annually with the industrial production growing on average by 6.2% annually and agricultural production 1.7 - 2.2%. Approximately 18% of the “working population” had been engaged in the industry (in Austria 25%, in France 30%) and it amounted only to 25% of the national income while agriculture - for 44%.
The government was facing serious problems with implementing industrialization program: shortage of the qualified cadres, inadequacy of a transportation system, Austrian competition, shortage of the domestic capital. Between 1881 and 1895 a number of laws had been introduced to stimulate the industrial development by providing the tax breaks, favorable railroad tariffs, state subsidies, state contracts, loans, etc. In 1890, the Government of Hungary established a special fund to promote the development of industry and trade in the country. This was good for jumpstarting the process but some experts had been warming that excessive dependency upon the state protection may backfire by limiting competitiveness and encouraging inefficient management.
The country was unable, due to objective and subjective factors, to carry out large-scale industrialization. Therefore, the efforts of the government and business were focused on creating a modern infrastructure (credit and financial system, transport, new means of communication) and industries focused on the processing of agricultural products, mining, metallurgy. The policy of “pointed industrialization” contributed to the development of certain high-tech industries (mechanical engineering, electrical, chemical, oil refining industries), which was stimulated by the country's government. Hungarian industry has produced and exported such high-tech products as vehicles (locomotives, cars, trams), electric incandescent lamps, transformers, medicines, etc.
The greatest success was in the railroads. By 1895 length of the railroad network reached 1,3947 km and kept growing. 95% of the goods had been carried by the rail. Travel from St. Petersburg to Budapest cost on a fast train 1 class 54 rubles, 2nd class - 37 rubles, on a passenger train - 26 rubles, 3rd class on a passenger train - 19 rubles.
Starting from 1890 40 - 50 new industrial enterprises had been open annually, partially due to the law of 1875 making easy to register a new company and allowing taking a capital out of the country, which was important for the foreign investors owning more than 10% of the industrial plants. In total, there were 4,047 enterprises with more than 20 employees.
The center of the country's economic life was Budapest. The city had the largest stock and commodity exchanges in Hungary, banks, insurance and transport companies. In 1894, out of 328 joint-stock companies in Hungary, 114 were located in Budapest. Almost half of all industrial capacities were also focused in Budapest, and in some sectors of industrial production this figure looked even higher. Thus, 85% of Hungarian machine manufacturers were located in the capital.
A specific feature of Hungary's industrial development was the exceptional importance of the flour milling industry in the country's economy. It wasn't accidental. Despite all the successes in the country's industrial development, the agricultural sector continued to play a dominant role in the people's economy of Hungary, so Hungary's economic situation largely derived from the availability of reliable markets for Hungarian agricultural products. With the growing competition from the American and Russian grain on the European markets Hungary got completely repriented toward the Austrian market: its consumption of the grain and flour grew from 67.8% and 60% of a total export in 1880 to 99.3% and 98% in 1900 with proportion of the flour (as being more profitable) steadily growing. At the end of the XIX century, more than 47,000 workers were employed in the flour milling industry of the country. More than 85% of the flour had been produced in Budapest. Success of the milling industry was defined by 2 factors: (a) high quality grain and (b) top notch milling equipment. Hungary produced from 3 million to 3.2 million tons of wheat flour per year, taking a leading position in the world in this indicator. The state of affairs in the flour milling industry has affecting other industries, in particular in mechanical engineering, coal mining, etc.
The next big item was sugar. From 1880 to 1905, sugar beet production in Hungary increased more than 10 times. By Hungarian standards, there were very large enterprises in the industry. Thus, the sugar factory in Serenche numbered more than 2,380 workers. In addition to meeting domestic needs, Hungary began exporting sugar to the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa and was competing with Russian sugar on some markets of Europe and Asia.
The rapid construction of railways that began after 1867, the need for agricultural machinery, equipment for the food industry led to the development of iron metallurgy, machine engineering, and mining. Despite a number of difficulties and, above all, competition from Austrian imports, Hungary's heavy industry gradually took a leading position in the country's national economy. From 1898 to 1900, the share of heavy industry in Hungary increased from 39.9 to 41.2% in the structure of industrial production. As pretty much everything else, most of the heavy industry was concentrated in Budapest. Hungarian locomotives and agricultural machinery had been exported into Russia and Russian capital was invested in some Hungarian enterprises. The Hungarian company “Mercury” started purchasing wheat, corn, millet, eggs in Southern Russia.
The national composition of the Hungarian workers was very diverse. About 63% of all workers were Hungarians, 15.4% were Germans, 10.1% were Slovaks. The largest percentage of Hungarian workers was in engineering and metalworking (69.1%), the lowest - in the mining industry (46.3%).
Capitalist class was growing but there was still a social wall between them and nobility. Nobles and bourgeois visited differnt clubs, casinos, restaurants, cafes.
Aristocrats and "gentry" preferred to build their country villas on the northern shore of Lake Balaton,
and the bourgeois on the southern shore. Jews received full equality in the country, they had close business contacts with German and Hungarian entrepreneurs and there were no external differences between the Jewish bourgeois and the rest of the elite of society, but an invisible watershed still existed. Bourgeois Jews, Germans, representatives of other non-Madyar peoples sought to imitate the aristocracy and "gentry", they made their names and surnames to sound “Hungrian”. To brighten up the "lowness" of origin, the bourgeois bought estates, land holdings, in clothes and behavior they also sought to imitate the nobility.
It should be noted that a number of important aristocratic families of the country sought to take their place in the industrialization of Hungary. Clans Andrashi, Palfi, Apponi, Zichi, etc. had their own mines, metallurgical enterprises, factories.
The political situation was in something like a never-ending low intensity crisis because the government had to deal with the minorities, big and small, and their demands regarding various forms of autonomy. Population reached 16,000,000 out of which the Hungarians amounted to slightly more than 51%. So far, the government was successfully navigating through the messy situation guaranteeing autonomies and representation in the Diet. The main issue, on which Hungarian government was working in a close cooperation with the Ottomans, was suppressing attempts for independence among the Serbs and Rumanians on both sides of the border. In the case of Hungary, even degree of autonomy enjoyed by the Ottoman Serbs and Rumanians was a no-no. Language, religion, local administration but nothing state-like. A “stimulus” was that with the lesser autonomy they still lived better in Hungary.
The Hungarians have set themselves the ambitious task of building a capital that is in no way inferior to Vienna and other European capitals. In the late XIX - early XX centuries, especially after unification in 1873 of Buda, Obuda and Pest into one city, the urban landscape of Budapest is completely changing. The city was permeated with new wide avenues, grandiose public buildings (parliament, stock exchange, etc.) bridges across the Danube are being built in it. In the 1880-90s more than 9,000 new buildings were built in Budapest, of which about 6,100 were residential buildings, the total amount spent on construction exceeded 360 million gouldens. The city was decorated with several parks with attractions, open to all citizens. Beautiful hotels were built in Budapest, which increased the flow of tourists to the city. An indicator of the improvement of the city was a decrease in mortality in it. In 1870, the mortality rate was 45 per 1,000 inhabitants, and in 1895 only 24.4.
Since the 1880s, the city has been experiencing a real transport revolution. 120 km of tram tracks were built in it. In 1896, for the first time in Europe, a subway electric road (metro) appeared in Budapest.
Ah, yes, Hungary also had an army…
____________
[1] One of the founders of Česká strana národně sociální (Czech National Socialist Party).
[2] The key words are “Tatiana’s Day” - the day of the traditional students’ (including the former ones) mass gatherings with speeches and drinking. The hero (a successful lawyer) is already completely drunk. FYI, V.Doroshevich was one of the leading journalists and satiric writers in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire.
[3] Which was quite silly: look at all these huge saphires.
[4] Národní strana svobodomyslná.
“In order to become internationalists, we must first become nationalists.”
Václav Jaroslav Klofáč [1]
“Young Czechs! I love Young Czechs! You know, brother, let's stop by the telegraph, and send them a telegram: "Old students, celebrating Tatiana's Day, wish you complete freedom of language." Oh my God, let's stop by! The Young Czechs will be happy! Very happy!”
V. Doroshevich, “Tatiana’s Day” [2]
“If we have enough food and wine, what else do we want? Why should Hungarian save money?"
Baron Lörinz Orzi
“Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért“
It is something in Hungarian and I have no idea what it means
Austrian Empire (cont.)Václav Jaroslav Klofáč [1]
“Young Czechs! I love Young Czechs! You know, brother, let's stop by the telegraph, and send them a telegram: "Old students, celebrating Tatiana's Day, wish you complete freedom of language." Oh my God, let's stop by! The Young Czechs will be happy! Very happy!”
V. Doroshevich, “Tatiana’s Day” [2]
“If we have enough food and wine, what else do we want? Why should Hungarian save money?"
Baron Lörinz Orzi
“Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért“
It is something in Hungarian and I have no idea what it means
Of course, while Vienna was beautiful and its coffee houses were just great, it did not mean that the empire was trouble free. And the main source of the internal troubles was Czechia. The lands of the Bohemian Crown were extremely important economically but, formally, they were just absorbed into the Austrian Empire with FJI not even bothering to get crowned by the Crown of Saint Wenceslas [3]. The Czechs had been represented in the imperial Reichstag and using the Czech language was legalized but, nonetheless, Czechia was something of a second class entity within the Empire and this was causing a considerable resentment. Rather fortunately for the monarchy, the nationalist parties had at least as strong dislike of each other as of the “Austrian oppression”.
The main Czech parties were:
- Staročeši (Old Czechs - from 1874), party founded in 1860 (as National Party) , had a wide support in pretty much all classes. Its platform was increasing the representation of Czech lands in the Reichsrat, expanding self-government, ensuring the equality of German and Czech languages in the Czech lands, legal confirmation of the civil and economic rights and freedoms. Leadership of the party was ready to compromise on the details to achieve its main goals. For several years, the party adhered to the tactics of passive opposition to the Viennese authorities by refusing to take seats in the Reichsrat, but in the mid-1870s it was decided to abandon this tactic. In 1879, the old man Pražek became Imperial Minister for Czech Affairs. His activities contributed to the dissemination of the Czech language in local administration and education. In 1890 the party signed an agreement regarding division of the empire into the German and Czech districts and lost a lot of its popularity.
- Mladočeši (Young Czechs), National Party of the Free Thinkers, [4] split from the main party in 1874. The party was getting active material support from large Czech industrialists and bankers. Did not demand independence but wanted national autonomy making empire a dual monarchy with economic unity, state support of the industry and export and nationalization of the railroads. Ah yes, also universal voting rights.
- In 1897 Česká strana národně sociální (Czech National Socialist Party). Its stress was on achieving a complete independence from the Hapsburg Empire. Do not confuse its socialism with marxism. The party was against the Marxist interpretation of internationalism as a complete denial of a national identity and was reformist rather than revolutionary: “collectivizing by means of development, surmounting of class struggle by national discipline, moral rebirth and democracy as the conditions of socialism, a powerful popular army, etc.”
- Sociálně Demokratická strana Českoslovanská v Rakousku (Social Democratic Czechoslavonic party in Austria) founded in 1878 was a regional wing of the Social Democratic Party of Austria and rather socialist than nationalist.
Hungary.
Being a close neighbor of the RE and occupying a strategic position on the Danube and between the Austrian and Ottoman empires, Hungary. would warrant a serious Russian attention even without the close family connection of its ruling family.
Hungary was the main food supplier for the Austrian Empire. Hungary had strategically important national resources (iron, copper, lead, gold, sulfur, etc.) in Slovakia and Transylvania and well-developed mining and metallurgical industries. As a result, the interest was not only on a geopolitical but also economic level. There was also a considerable commonality: both countries were still in a process of the intensive industrialization with the agricultural sector (and its export) still playing a very important role. Both countries were modernizing their agriculture and existing experience was of a mutual interest.
Of course, there were good and bad years but the national income was growing on average 3.8% annually with the industrial production growing on average by 6.2% annually and agricultural production 1.7 - 2.2%. Approximately 18% of the “working population” had been engaged in the industry (in Austria 25%, in France 30%) and it amounted only to 25% of the national income while agriculture - for 44%.
The government was facing serious problems with implementing industrialization program: shortage of the qualified cadres, inadequacy of a transportation system, Austrian competition, shortage of the domestic capital. Between 1881 and 1895 a number of laws had been introduced to stimulate the industrial development by providing the tax breaks, favorable railroad tariffs, state subsidies, state contracts, loans, etc. In 1890, the Government of Hungary established a special fund to promote the development of industry and trade in the country. This was good for jumpstarting the process but some experts had been warming that excessive dependency upon the state protection may backfire by limiting competitiveness and encouraging inefficient management.
The country was unable, due to objective and subjective factors, to carry out large-scale industrialization. Therefore, the efforts of the government and business were focused on creating a modern infrastructure (credit and financial system, transport, new means of communication) and industries focused on the processing of agricultural products, mining, metallurgy. The policy of “pointed industrialization” contributed to the development of certain high-tech industries (mechanical engineering, electrical, chemical, oil refining industries), which was stimulated by the country's government. Hungarian industry has produced and exported such high-tech products as vehicles (locomotives, cars, trams), electric incandescent lamps, transformers, medicines, etc.
The greatest success was in the railroads. By 1895 length of the railroad network reached 1,3947 km and kept growing. 95% of the goods had been carried by the rail. Travel from St. Petersburg to Budapest cost on a fast train 1 class 54 rubles, 2nd class - 37 rubles, on a passenger train - 26 rubles, 3rd class on a passenger train - 19 rubles.
Starting from 1890 40 - 50 new industrial enterprises had been open annually, partially due to the law of 1875 making easy to register a new company and allowing taking a capital out of the country, which was important for the foreign investors owning more than 10% of the industrial plants. In total, there were 4,047 enterprises with more than 20 employees.
The center of the country's economic life was Budapest. The city had the largest stock and commodity exchanges in Hungary, banks, insurance and transport companies. In 1894, out of 328 joint-stock companies in Hungary, 114 were located in Budapest. Almost half of all industrial capacities were also focused in Budapest, and in some sectors of industrial production this figure looked even higher. Thus, 85% of Hungarian machine manufacturers were located in the capital.
A specific feature of Hungary's industrial development was the exceptional importance of the flour milling industry in the country's economy. It wasn't accidental. Despite all the successes in the country's industrial development, the agricultural sector continued to play a dominant role in the people's economy of Hungary, so Hungary's economic situation largely derived from the availability of reliable markets for Hungarian agricultural products. With the growing competition from the American and Russian grain on the European markets Hungary got completely repriented toward the Austrian market: its consumption of the grain and flour grew from 67.8% and 60% of a total export in 1880 to 99.3% and 98% in 1900 with proportion of the flour (as being more profitable) steadily growing. At the end of the XIX century, more than 47,000 workers were employed in the flour milling industry of the country. More than 85% of the flour had been produced in Budapest. Success of the milling industry was defined by 2 factors: (a) high quality grain and (b) top notch milling equipment. Hungary produced from 3 million to 3.2 million tons of wheat flour per year, taking a leading position in the world in this indicator. The state of affairs in the flour milling industry has affecting other industries, in particular in mechanical engineering, coal mining, etc.
The next big item was sugar. From 1880 to 1905, sugar beet production in Hungary increased more than 10 times. By Hungarian standards, there were very large enterprises in the industry. Thus, the sugar factory in Serenche numbered more than 2,380 workers. In addition to meeting domestic needs, Hungary began exporting sugar to the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa and was competing with Russian sugar on some markets of Europe and Asia.
The rapid construction of railways that began after 1867, the need for agricultural machinery, equipment for the food industry led to the development of iron metallurgy, machine engineering, and mining. Despite a number of difficulties and, above all, competition from Austrian imports, Hungary's heavy industry gradually took a leading position in the country's national economy. From 1898 to 1900, the share of heavy industry in Hungary increased from 39.9 to 41.2% in the structure of industrial production. As pretty much everything else, most of the heavy industry was concentrated in Budapest. Hungarian locomotives and agricultural machinery had been exported into Russia and Russian capital was invested in some Hungarian enterprises. The Hungarian company “Mercury” started purchasing wheat, corn, millet, eggs in Southern Russia.
The national composition of the Hungarian workers was very diverse. About 63% of all workers were Hungarians, 15.4% were Germans, 10.1% were Slovaks. The largest percentage of Hungarian workers was in engineering and metalworking (69.1%), the lowest - in the mining industry (46.3%).
Capitalist class was growing but there was still a social wall between them and nobility. Nobles and bourgeois visited differnt clubs, casinos, restaurants, cafes.
Aristocrats and "gentry" preferred to build their country villas on the northern shore of Lake Balaton,
and the bourgeois on the southern shore. Jews received full equality in the country, they had close business contacts with German and Hungarian entrepreneurs and there were no external differences between the Jewish bourgeois and the rest of the elite of society, but an invisible watershed still existed. Bourgeois Jews, Germans, representatives of other non-Madyar peoples sought to imitate the aristocracy and "gentry", they made their names and surnames to sound “Hungrian”. To brighten up the "lowness" of origin, the bourgeois bought estates, land holdings, in clothes and behavior they also sought to imitate the nobility.
It should be noted that a number of important aristocratic families of the country sought to take their place in the industrialization of Hungary. Clans Andrashi, Palfi, Apponi, Zichi, etc. had their own mines, metallurgical enterprises, factories.
The political situation was in something like a never-ending low intensity crisis because the government had to deal with the minorities, big and small, and their demands regarding various forms of autonomy. Population reached 16,000,000 out of which the Hungarians amounted to slightly more than 51%. So far, the government was successfully navigating through the messy situation guaranteeing autonomies and representation in the Diet. The main issue, on which Hungarian government was working in a close cooperation with the Ottomans, was suppressing attempts for independence among the Serbs and Rumanians on both sides of the border. In the case of Hungary, even degree of autonomy enjoyed by the Ottoman Serbs and Rumanians was a no-no. Language, religion, local administration but nothing state-like. A “stimulus” was that with the lesser autonomy they still lived better in Hungary.
The Hungarians have set themselves the ambitious task of building a capital that is in no way inferior to Vienna and other European capitals. In the late XIX - early XX centuries, especially after unification in 1873 of Buda, Obuda and Pest into one city, the urban landscape of Budapest is completely changing. The city was permeated with new wide avenues, grandiose public buildings (parliament, stock exchange, etc.) bridges across the Danube are being built in it. In the 1880-90s more than 9,000 new buildings were built in Budapest, of which about 6,100 were residential buildings, the total amount spent on construction exceeded 360 million gouldens. The city was decorated with several parks with attractions, open to all citizens. Beautiful hotels were built in Budapest, which increased the flow of tourists to the city. An indicator of the improvement of the city was a decrease in mortality in it. In 1870, the mortality rate was 45 per 1,000 inhabitants, and in 1895 only 24.4.
Since the 1880s, the city has been experiencing a real transport revolution. 120 km of tram tracks were built in it. In 1896, for the first time in Europe, a subway electric road (metro) appeared in Budapest.
Ah, yes, Hungary also had an army…
____________
[1] One of the founders of Česká strana národně sociální (Czech National Socialist Party).
[2] The key words are “Tatiana’s Day” - the day of the traditional students’ (including the former ones) mass gatherings with speeches and drinking. The hero (a successful lawyer) is already completely drunk. FYI, V.Doroshevich was one of the leading journalists and satiric writers in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire.
[3] Which was quite silly: look at all these huge saphires.
[4] Národní strana svobodomyslná.
I admit, not sure how Austria and Hungary will evolve with their minorities, on one hand they seem to be managing them quite well on the other the fear they rebel is there plus both of them could very well absorb the smaller minorities into them the main groups if they try, though admittingly Hungary has more of a challenge given a large chunk of theirs's have some form of self rule just across the border.
ITTL he is already a king, Miklos I. As you can see, Hungary is quite successful. Actually, in OTL it was doing fine (give or take few crisises) but now this can be “blamed” on him. 😉
Well, there should be some challenges or it will be plain boring. The Hungarian case is more problematic but the Serbs and Romanians do have some autonomy plus, unlike those on the Ottoman side, they have participation in the government and higher living standards so the outright rebellion is not inevitable. OTOH, those on the other side, with all their autonomy, are kept in check by the Sultan: Abdul Hamid already demonstrated in Armenia and Greece that messing with him is not a good idea and, unlike Crete, nobody is going to interfere on the rebels’ behalf.
In the Austrian case, FJI just have to go to the Saints Vitus Cathedral and the whole thing will be over in no time.
The “Belt” #3
322. The “Belt” #3
Measures:
1 square klafter = 3.5979 square metres.
1 yoke (Joch, with which the size of fields was measured) = 1,600 square klafters (with sides measuring 8 by 200 klafters) = 5,754 m2 = 0.575 ha.
Besides the never-ending national issues, Kingdom of Hungary had a serious problem on the quite Huugarian Great Hungarian Plain: the poor and landless peasants. The continued extremely rapid growth of the population had far outstripped that of the means of production. The growth of industry was still too slow to absorb the surplus rural population, and, in spite of a high emigration rate acute rural congestion had developed.
In Hungarian agriculture by this According to agricultural statistics for 1895, there were approximately 2,389,000 farms in Hungary that cultivated 36,856,000 yokes of land. According to the same data, 63.7% of the total number of farms had plots of no more than 5 yokes. They owned only 5.85% of the cultivated area. On the other hand, 0.71% of the total number of farms owned 47.66% of the land. 1,500,000 poor peasant farms owned a little more than 2 million yokes, and 1,500 landlords owned about 12 million yokes. The households owning less than 5 yokes had been below self-sustainability level and were forced to look for an outside work and further 1.7 million persons (wage earners) were totally landless. A large proportion of these rural workers were forced to live in conditions of extreme misery and near starvation. The living standards and conditions of the industrial workers, especially the unskilled, were also very low.
And, of course, most of the landowners preferred to retain the “feudal relations” [1]. Thus, farm laborers on the estates received only part of their wages with money, the rest - in in produce. In one of the estates of Count Alexandre Carogli in the early 90s, the annual salary of farm labourers was composed of the following elements: 12 centners of rye, 8 kg of wheat, 2 centners of barley, 14 kg of lard, 120 square klafters of corn field, 100 square clafters of a garden, 1 pig with 2 piglets and 100 crowns in cash.
Plus, the landowners tended to use the “domestic laws”, which were actually the contracts between the employees and employers and sometimes contained absolutely draconian items like “1. The farm labourer must unquestioningly obey the manager or his substitute person. 2. The farm worker has no right to leave the estate without permission on holidays or Sundays. 3. The farmer is obliged to work as long as necessary without any objections and comments… They receive an increase to the salary only when they perform work outside their place of residence for more than 2 consecutive weeks without interruption…. 14. If someone is exposed of theft or concealment of the theft committed by another, as well as of actions contrary to the above rules, or in acts against these rules, he is punishable by immediate dismissal, and od loses all the salary he has received on this estate and must return what he has already received.” [2]
The farm hands lived on the estates, hence many rules (skipped) forbidding drunkenness, quarrels, etc., but they were allowed to keep their own livestock.
A category more or less fitting into the “feudal” classification were poor peasants renting the land, working on it with their own equipment and paying by a part of a product. There was approximately 2,500,000 of them.
Understandably, these categories of people had been permanently unhappy with the situation and tried to improve it by creating the local unions while the landowners and local administration tried to prevent their creation. There were some bloody accidents requiring deployment of the troops and martial law. Interestingly enough, in his letter to the congress of the Hungarian SD party in 1894, Engels described situation as a necessary step toward <whatever>: “We have to go through this capitalist revolution in one way or another. It brings with it untold suffering to the broad masses of the people, but only it creates the conditions under which a new social system becomes possible, as well as those men and women who will have the strength and will to implement this new, better social system.” [3]
The “capitalist development” in the Hungarian agriculture had been led not by the peasants but the big landowners who were turning their estates into the capitalist enterprises with the help of the banks. However, the process also involved breaking of some of the big estates into the small peasant farms and this involved the state-owned lands as well (pretty much as in the RE). Still, there was a “land hunger” and 80 - 100,000 peasants had been annually emigrated to the US. Approximately two thirds of them had been leaving forever while the remaining one third was going temporarily just to get enough money to repay the debts.
Peasantry, of course, was not a monolithic class. In the 1990s, Hungary had approximately 11/2 million poor peasants, 715,000 middle peasants and 158,000 wealthy. By the 1990s, Hungarian agriculture did not lag behind the pan-European level of mechanization. Not only landlords' estates, but also farms of rich peasants were largely mechanized. Which, while being generally positive tendency, also decreased a number of the needed agricultural workers while increasing number of the poorest peasants.
With the agricultural unemployment growing, the hiring conditions predictably worsened and with the Hungarian SD party refusing to consider the agricultural workers as a “true proletariat” [4], the peasants had to create their own Independent Socialist Party, which declared itself to be internationalist “because oppression of the people is internationalist by its substance”. It also declared as its goals creation of the stateless (state being source of all evils) union of the workers, replaced of the army with the armed people, religion free education, etc. Of course, this was probably more anarchist than socialist [5] platform but at least they got their own party and could enjoy it. Ah, yes, they were demanding land redistribution and in 1897 there was a major strike to which government responded with the martial law and party’s leader was accused in inciting the riot and arrested. The party began falling apart and eventually was replaced by the Reformed SD Party, which existed for few years and also disintegrated.
In general, the government (or anybody else) could do little to change the existing trend and, actually, changing it by distributing small parcels of land to the poorer peasants would mean (a) that Hungary will not be able to export agricultural products and (b) that without government keeping them functional by the subsidies, these peasants will be financially ruined within few years and … see above. The only thing that the government of King Miklos I could do was to provide some improvements of the agricultural infrastructure: roads, irrigational canals, etc. The country was not industrialized enough to support a fast growing population and emigration was considered a safe valve.
Hungarian political philosophy insisted more strongly than ever that the Hungarian state must be Magyar in spirit, in its institutions, and, as far as possible, in its language. Suggestions to the contrary, or appeals to the Nationalities Law, met with derision or abuse. In spite of the law, the use of minority languages was banished almost entirely from administration and even justice. While the autonomy of the church schools was hardly attacked until the 20th century, most denominations saw to it that all secondary education in their schools, with trivial exceptions, was in Hungarian. The Magyar language was also overrepresented in the primary schools. There were 13,453 Hungarian-language elementary schools, compared with 2,233 schools that instructed in Romanian, 447 in German, 377 in Slovak, 270 in Serbian, 59 in Ruthenian, and 10 in various other languages.
The state apparatus was entirely Hungarian in language, as were business and social life above the lowest levels. The proportion of the population with Hungarian as its mother tongue rose from 46.6 percent in 1880 to 51.4 percent in 1900. The Magyarization of the towns had proceeded at an astounding rate. Nearly all middle-class Jews and Germans and many middle-class Slovaks and Ruthenes had been Magyarized. However, this process had hardly touched the rural populations of the periphery, and the linguistic frontiers had hardly shifted from the line on which they had been stabilized in the 18th century. This was especially so among the Romanians. As a result, the important part of the Hungarian foreign policy was to work in concert with the Ottoman government on not letting its vassal states of Walachia and Serbia to get too much of the independence and to prevent them from any kind of inappropriate propaganda across the border. Which was making the formal autonomy on the Hungarian side limited to the local administrative issues and a representation in a national diet. The task was at least somewhat simplified by the fact that, while the Romanians were a majority in Transylvania, there were also significant minorities in the region and some parts of it had a mixed population.
Ottoman Empire.
There was nothing really new there. Abdul Hamid II maintained his pan-Islamist policy, still having problems in Armenia and, for all practical purposes, losing control over the Crete, which was still under international occupation limiting Ottoman rule to the right to appoint a governor who, without any military force of his own, was pretty much powerless. However, he was managing, not without the help, to keep the Balkan vassal states reasonably subdued: as was demonstrated by the Greek War, his army was more than adequate to beat the crap of any of them and none of them could count on a serious outside help because Russia, Germany, Austria and Hungary made it absolutely clear that the status quo on the Balkans is going to be maintained. By force, if necessary. There were no enthusiasts willing to check if they are serious.
At least for a while, Greece put aside its expansionist ideas on the Balkans and stopped inciting the Greek population of the Crete expecting that it will join Greece on its own after the international force finally go away.
The Ottoman economy and financial situation gradually were getting back to normal and the textile manufacturing in inland Anatolia based on the imports of Egyptian cotton yarn was rather successful.
After the naval fiasco of the Greek war when the Ottoman fleet could not get out of its base, Abdul Hamid II finally got enough money to start a modest naval program. In 1892 he ordered construction of Abdül Kadir, the first capital ship to be laid down by the Ottomans in more than a decade. She was to have a main armament of four 28-centimeter (11 in) guns, with an armored belt that was 230 mm (9.1 in) thick. Work proceeded on the ship very slowly, primarily the result of a lack of funds and during the long construction period, the supports for the keel shifted, which distorted the structure and prevented completion. The unfinished ship was eventually scrapped.
Other than this, probably the most exciting events was visit by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1889.
________
[1] Which is (IMO) a BS definition because in so-called “feudalism” (the term seemingly being mostly out of favor with the non-Marxist historians who can’t agree on what the Hell it means; much easier for the Marxists: it is something squeezed between the Slavery based Ancient World and cash based Capitalism) an exploiter (feudal) did not pay the exploited (a peasant) any compensation in any form: a serf had to work certain amount of time on lord’s land and for this had a right to work the rest of time for himself; as an alternative, just give the lord certain part of a produced product. But the term is seemingly being used for pretty much anything which involves compensation not exclusively in cash. As an idle thought, when nowadays a company provides health insurance as a part of a compensation package, can it be defined as “feudal relations” as well? 😜
[2] Skipping the rights regarding having your own poultry and pigs, specifics of the duties and some other similar stuff, it does not look too different from employment at will contract for the salaried employees in high-tech (at least as far as I remember). Of course, the Hell is in the details, even if the insignificant ones. Like compensation size. 😪
[3] Probably this means “feudalism is bad, capitalism is better, f—k off and don’t distract me from squeezing money from the workers of my factory so that I can support by buddy Karl”. But perhaps my interpretation is wrong: never was good in a correct interpretation of the Marxist writings.
[4] These peasants just had to read Das Kapital to find out that they aren’t and stop bothering the true Marxists with the attempts to squeeze themselves into the most progressive class ever.
[5] Whatever socialist platform may be.
“Tell me,' he asked, with some embarassment, as we strolled along: 'you're a bloody German, aren't you?'
'Oh, no. I'm Hungarian.'
'Hungarian?'
'Hungarian.'
'What's that? Is that a country? Or you are just having me on?
'Not at all. On my word of honour, it is a country.'
'And where do you Hungarians live?'
'In Hungary. Between Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia'.
'Come off it. Those places were made up by Shakespeare. “
Antal Szerb
“I don't find anything attractive and instructive in poverty. She didn't teach me anything and only perverted my idea of the values of life.”
Charlie Chaplin
“I want to live like a poor man with money.”
Pablo Picasso
“The poor disgust us because they are us, shorn of our illusions. They show us what we'd look like without our fine clothes. How we'd smell without perfume.”
Game of the thrones
“It's easy to be rich and not boast of it; it's hard to be poor and not to complain.”
Confucius
Hungary. cont.'Oh, no. I'm Hungarian.'
'Hungarian?'
'Hungarian.'
'What's that? Is that a country? Or you are just having me on?
'Not at all. On my word of honour, it is a country.'
'And where do you Hungarians live?'
'In Hungary. Between Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia'.
'Come off it. Those places were made up by Shakespeare. “
Antal Szerb
“I don't find anything attractive and instructive in poverty. She didn't teach me anything and only perverted my idea of the values of life.”
Charlie Chaplin
“I want to live like a poor man with money.”
Pablo Picasso
“The poor disgust us because they are us, shorn of our illusions. They show us what we'd look like without our fine clothes. How we'd smell without perfume.”
Game of the thrones
“It's easy to be rich and not boast of it; it's hard to be poor and not to complain.”
Confucius
Measures:
1 square klafter = 3.5979 square metres.
1 yoke (Joch, with which the size of fields was measured) = 1,600 square klafters (with sides measuring 8 by 200 klafters) = 5,754 m2 = 0.575 ha.
Besides the never-ending national issues, Kingdom of Hungary had a serious problem on the quite Huugarian Great Hungarian Plain: the poor and landless peasants. The continued extremely rapid growth of the population had far outstripped that of the means of production. The growth of industry was still too slow to absorb the surplus rural population, and, in spite of a high emigration rate acute rural congestion had developed.
In Hungarian agriculture by this According to agricultural statistics for 1895, there were approximately 2,389,000 farms in Hungary that cultivated 36,856,000 yokes of land. According to the same data, 63.7% of the total number of farms had plots of no more than 5 yokes. They owned only 5.85% of the cultivated area. On the other hand, 0.71% of the total number of farms owned 47.66% of the land. 1,500,000 poor peasant farms owned a little more than 2 million yokes, and 1,500 landlords owned about 12 million yokes. The households owning less than 5 yokes had been below self-sustainability level and were forced to look for an outside work and further 1.7 million persons (wage earners) were totally landless. A large proportion of these rural workers were forced to live in conditions of extreme misery and near starvation. The living standards and conditions of the industrial workers, especially the unskilled, were also very low.
And, of course, most of the landowners preferred to retain the “feudal relations” [1]. Thus, farm laborers on the estates received only part of their wages with money, the rest - in in produce. In one of the estates of Count Alexandre Carogli in the early 90s, the annual salary of farm labourers was composed of the following elements: 12 centners of rye, 8 kg of wheat, 2 centners of barley, 14 kg of lard, 120 square klafters of corn field, 100 square clafters of a garden, 1 pig with 2 piglets and 100 crowns in cash.
Plus, the landowners tended to use the “domestic laws”, which were actually the contracts between the employees and employers and sometimes contained absolutely draconian items like “1. The farm labourer must unquestioningly obey the manager or his substitute person. 2. The farm worker has no right to leave the estate without permission on holidays or Sundays. 3. The farmer is obliged to work as long as necessary without any objections and comments… They receive an increase to the salary only when they perform work outside their place of residence for more than 2 consecutive weeks without interruption…. 14. If someone is exposed of theft or concealment of the theft committed by another, as well as of actions contrary to the above rules, or in acts against these rules, he is punishable by immediate dismissal, and od loses all the salary he has received on this estate and must return what he has already received.” [2]
The farm hands lived on the estates, hence many rules (skipped) forbidding drunkenness, quarrels, etc., but they were allowed to keep their own livestock.
A category more or less fitting into the “feudal” classification were poor peasants renting the land, working on it with their own equipment and paying by a part of a product. There was approximately 2,500,000 of them.
Understandably, these categories of people had been permanently unhappy with the situation and tried to improve it by creating the local unions while the landowners and local administration tried to prevent their creation. There were some bloody accidents requiring deployment of the troops and martial law. Interestingly enough, in his letter to the congress of the Hungarian SD party in 1894, Engels described situation as a necessary step toward <whatever>: “We have to go through this capitalist revolution in one way or another. It brings with it untold suffering to the broad masses of the people, but only it creates the conditions under which a new social system becomes possible, as well as those men and women who will have the strength and will to implement this new, better social system.” [3]
The “capitalist development” in the Hungarian agriculture had been led not by the peasants but the big landowners who were turning their estates into the capitalist enterprises with the help of the banks. However, the process also involved breaking of some of the big estates into the small peasant farms and this involved the state-owned lands as well (pretty much as in the RE). Still, there was a “land hunger” and 80 - 100,000 peasants had been annually emigrated to the US. Approximately two thirds of them had been leaving forever while the remaining one third was going temporarily just to get enough money to repay the debts.
Peasantry, of course, was not a monolithic class. In the 1990s, Hungary had approximately 11/2 million poor peasants, 715,000 middle peasants and 158,000 wealthy. By the 1990s, Hungarian agriculture did not lag behind the pan-European level of mechanization. Not only landlords' estates, but also farms of rich peasants were largely mechanized. Which, while being generally positive tendency, also decreased a number of the needed agricultural workers while increasing number of the poorest peasants.
With the agricultural unemployment growing, the hiring conditions predictably worsened and with the Hungarian SD party refusing to consider the agricultural workers as a “true proletariat” [4], the peasants had to create their own Independent Socialist Party, which declared itself to be internationalist “because oppression of the people is internationalist by its substance”. It also declared as its goals creation of the stateless (state being source of all evils) union of the workers, replaced of the army with the armed people, religion free education, etc. Of course, this was probably more anarchist than socialist [5] platform but at least they got their own party and could enjoy it. Ah, yes, they were demanding land redistribution and in 1897 there was a major strike to which government responded with the martial law and party’s leader was accused in inciting the riot and arrested. The party began falling apart and eventually was replaced by the Reformed SD Party, which existed for few years and also disintegrated.
In general, the government (or anybody else) could do little to change the existing trend and, actually, changing it by distributing small parcels of land to the poorer peasants would mean (a) that Hungary will not be able to export agricultural products and (b) that without government keeping them functional by the subsidies, these peasants will be financially ruined within few years and … see above. The only thing that the government of King Miklos I could do was to provide some improvements of the agricultural infrastructure: roads, irrigational canals, etc. The country was not industrialized enough to support a fast growing population and emigration was considered a safe valve.
Hungarian political philosophy insisted more strongly than ever that the Hungarian state must be Magyar in spirit, in its institutions, and, as far as possible, in its language. Suggestions to the contrary, or appeals to the Nationalities Law, met with derision or abuse. In spite of the law, the use of minority languages was banished almost entirely from administration and even justice. While the autonomy of the church schools was hardly attacked until the 20th century, most denominations saw to it that all secondary education in their schools, with trivial exceptions, was in Hungarian. The Magyar language was also overrepresented in the primary schools. There were 13,453 Hungarian-language elementary schools, compared with 2,233 schools that instructed in Romanian, 447 in German, 377 in Slovak, 270 in Serbian, 59 in Ruthenian, and 10 in various other languages.
The state apparatus was entirely Hungarian in language, as were business and social life above the lowest levels. The proportion of the population with Hungarian as its mother tongue rose from 46.6 percent in 1880 to 51.4 percent in 1900. The Magyarization of the towns had proceeded at an astounding rate. Nearly all middle-class Jews and Germans and many middle-class Slovaks and Ruthenes had been Magyarized. However, this process had hardly touched the rural populations of the periphery, and the linguistic frontiers had hardly shifted from the line on which they had been stabilized in the 18th century. This was especially so among the Romanians. As a result, the important part of the Hungarian foreign policy was to work in concert with the Ottoman government on not letting its vassal states of Walachia and Serbia to get too much of the independence and to prevent them from any kind of inappropriate propaganda across the border. Which was making the formal autonomy on the Hungarian side limited to the local administrative issues and a representation in a national diet. The task was at least somewhat simplified by the fact that, while the Romanians were a majority in Transylvania, there were also significant minorities in the region and some parts of it had a mixed population.
Ottoman Empire.
There was nothing really new there. Abdul Hamid II maintained his pan-Islamist policy, still having problems in Armenia and, for all practical purposes, losing control over the Crete, which was still under international occupation limiting Ottoman rule to the right to appoint a governor who, without any military force of his own, was pretty much powerless. However, he was managing, not without the help, to keep the Balkan vassal states reasonably subdued: as was demonstrated by the Greek War, his army was more than adequate to beat the crap of any of them and none of them could count on a serious outside help because Russia, Germany, Austria and Hungary made it absolutely clear that the status quo on the Balkans is going to be maintained. By force, if necessary. There were no enthusiasts willing to check if they are serious.
At least for a while, Greece put aside its expansionist ideas on the Balkans and stopped inciting the Greek population of the Crete expecting that it will join Greece on its own after the international force finally go away.
The Ottoman economy and financial situation gradually were getting back to normal and the textile manufacturing in inland Anatolia based on the imports of Egyptian cotton yarn was rather successful.
After the naval fiasco of the Greek war when the Ottoman fleet could not get out of its base, Abdul Hamid II finally got enough money to start a modest naval program. In 1892 he ordered construction of Abdül Kadir, the first capital ship to be laid down by the Ottomans in more than a decade. She was to have a main armament of four 28-centimeter (11 in) guns, with an armored belt that was 230 mm (9.1 in) thick. Work proceeded on the ship very slowly, primarily the result of a lack of funds and during the long construction period, the supports for the keel shifted, which distorted the structure and prevented completion. The unfinished ship was eventually scrapped.
Other than this, probably the most exciting events was visit by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1889.
________
[1] Which is (IMO) a BS definition because in so-called “feudalism” (the term seemingly being mostly out of favor with the non-Marxist historians who can’t agree on what the Hell it means; much easier for the Marxists: it is something squeezed between the Slavery based Ancient World and cash based Capitalism) an exploiter (feudal) did not pay the exploited (a peasant) any compensation in any form: a serf had to work certain amount of time on lord’s land and for this had a right to work the rest of time for himself; as an alternative, just give the lord certain part of a produced product. But the term is seemingly being used for pretty much anything which involves compensation not exclusively in cash. As an idle thought, when nowadays a company provides health insurance as a part of a compensation package, can it be defined as “feudal relations” as well? 😜
[2] Skipping the rights regarding having your own poultry and pigs, specifics of the duties and some other similar stuff, it does not look too different from employment at will contract for the salaried employees in high-tech (at least as far as I remember). Of course, the Hell is in the details, even if the insignificant ones. Like compensation size. 😪
[3] Probably this means “feudalism is bad, capitalism is better, f—k off and don’t distract me from squeezing money from the workers of my factory so that I can support by buddy Karl”. But perhaps my interpretation is wrong: never was good in a correct interpretation of the Marxist writings.
[4] These peasants just had to read Das Kapital to find out that they aren’t and stop bothering the true Marxists with the attempts to squeeze themselves into the most progressive class ever.
[5] Whatever socialist platform may be.
With Russia doing much better, giving subsidies to Farmers in the East and a relatively good railway connection, wouldn't it make more sense to travel to Russia?
Did not think about it but why would Russia give subsidies to the foreigners when the main purpose was to deal with its own land crisis?
To get more Farmers in the east. Preferably not Chinese ones (since they did not get along 😉)
And how about the land crisis? The foreign farmers are fine and their own landless peasants to do what?
Well I distinctly remember someone (you?) telling me the number of Russian farmers willing to go east was low, even with the incentives. What I don't recall what the Russian landless peasants did though, didn't they go to the cities?
Anyway, I was thinking adding the Hungarian - and for that matter, other European nation - volunteers wouldn't make a dent in the numbers needed, nor will it meaningfully displace any Russians willing to move (since there weren't 100,000s of those). So yes it would cost a bit of budget, but displacing Chinese and becoming productive members of the Empire is worth it IMHO.
Yes, the process was slow. By 1917 population of the Prinorie was approximately 300,000. Between 1806 and 1914 moved eastward (mostly Siberia) over 3,000,000 out of which over 500,000 returned. But in 1897 “excessive” population amounted to 35% so this was not too much in the absolute numbers.
The second part is different in OTL and ITTL. In OTL Russian industry was not big enough and was not growing fast enough to accommodate all ‘excessive’ population so:
- part was going into the industries, which does not necessarily means “cities”: mines and RR construction were not city-centric.
- part was getting part-time non-agricultural jobs to get extra money (for example, in timber industry).
- part was getting non-industrial full time jobs in the cities.
- part became the hired agricultural labor.
- part was in deep s—t relying upon the occasional short time opportunities
Well, fine. We can assume that some of them go to Russia.
Let’s not idealize the situation. The whole mess had been triggered by a sharp increase of the population growth in the end of XIX century and the main problem how to get the “extra” people busy ASAP. ITTL the industrial sector is much bigger than in OTL and it grows faster but not fast enough to absorb all surplus immediately. Hence a growing land crisis made worse by the peasants’ conservatism. ITTL it is less prominent than in OTL but it is still a major factor. Increasing population of the Pacific coast is cherry on a very big cake, not #1 priority. So the last thing RE needs at that point are hundreds thousands of the dirt poor foreign peasants who will come with nothing and can’t even speak Russian.
As far as the resettlement to the Asian Russia is involved, in OTL the resellers had been helped with transportation (look at the painting above: they were moving with the household stuff) and the loans given at the favorable rates. Government was allocating slots of a land and providing some infrastructure. Most of the resettlers were middle income peasants who had skills but could not do better within rural community.
Now, the foreigners, unless they are well-off, and we are not talking about that category of people, will come with nothing. In OTL the Hungarian peasants emigrating to the US were typically working as a farm hands but this category is already too big in both OTL and ATL Russia and in the US the pay in higher, anyway. So the proposal implies that government has to provide the foreign immigrants with pretty much everything before they are of any use. But the resources are not unlimited and the task #1 is to deal with a problem of its own “extra” population, not to get the big numbers of moneyless foreigners with no some exceptional and urgently needed skills. They are coming in the limited numbers, anyway (Armenian genocide, disturbances in the Balkans) but they are pretty much on their own, and they are not eager to go all the way to Siberia and Far East (wrong climate, agriculture they are not used to, etc.).
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