Introduction: Fine-Scale Research on Development Levels and Inequalities in the Kingdom of Hungary (1330–1910)

The study of the dynamics of economic performance has been at the forefront of the interest of economists and historians for decades. In Europe, a methodological and historical debate has developed around the identification of the era of the “Great Divergence,”1 when the “rise of the West, fall of the rest” (“first globalization”)2 began. Linking globalization and the growth of inequality together, and projecting it back to historical periods, not only offers a possibility to test Jeffrey Williamson’s hypothesis that inequalities grow in the initial phase of capitalism but thereafter decrease, but also provides an opportunity to evaluate the competitiveness of different political-economic systems.3 Western authors have found parliamentary monarchies and democracies to be more efficient in terms of economic performance compared to Eastern despotisms, which were outperformed even by Western absolutism.4 And wherever despotic states proved to be economically effective, it was the inequalities that came to the rescue of the West, as inequalities still proved to be much greater in China, the Brazilian Empire, or Bourbon Naples compared to England or France.5In the articles of this issue of HSR we also attempt to assess the long-term performance of different socioeconomic and political systems in Hungary from the specific perspective of regional inequalities and development levels; but when doing this, we focus on intra-country differences rather than on performance comparisons between states. However, four critical methodological remarks on the above-mentioned efforts of global historiography are necessary to highlight the aims of the group of articles and to validate the methods used here.The first remark concerns GDP reconstructions for the historical past and on that basis identifying the era of the Great Divergence. This is a risky endeavor: Statistical knowledge cannot substitute for historical knowledge; the reconstruction of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman GDP without the Sultan’s private treasury led to inaccurate estimates.6 And this means that the identification of the roots of backwardness and thus the assessment of the competitiveness of Ottoman political regimes was also wrong.Another criticism concerns the GDP calculated for the early twentieth century. Angus Maddison reconstructed historical GDP using proxy data, as the term was invented only after World War I.7 According to the Bulgarian economist-historian Martin Ivanov, adapting calculations based on proxy indicators which “work” in Western Europe can lead to erroneous results in the Balkans, again affecting the hypothetical timing of the “rise of the West, fall of the rest” process and the role of different socioeconomic and political formations within it.8The third comment relates to the spatial scaling of GDP per capita. Maddison provides only country-level data, so it does not allow for the identification of the regional differences within a country. Although David Good and Tongshu Ma, as well as Max-Stephan Schulze, have reconstructed GDP per capita for the two dozen provinces of Austria-Hungary between 1870 and 1910, they were not able to go back in time further than this and have not attempted to produce a finer spatial resolution.9Finally, the concept of development and how it should be measured still allows for a wide range of interpretations. As GDP is one-dimensional, focusing only on economic aspects, it does not reflect health or culture; the introduction of inequalities to supplement development offers a multidimensional, balanced approach. Though this perspective has had a positive reception in historiography, measuring historical inequalities within a country is still a novelty, because of a lack of fine-resolution historical datasets.10 The need for composite indicators referring to welfare (to substitute for fine-resolution GDP data missing before the twentieth century) is also problematic. It is no coincidence that neither Maddison, nor Branko Milanovic and Williamson, nor Thomas Piketty’s or François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson’s studies of inequality, aimed to measure within-country differences.11 Fine-resolution historical inequality studies either focus on social strata (i.e., do not have a spatial aspect) or are conducted using targeted sampling (e.g., in cities) due to the limitation of sources; thus they do not provide complete spatial coverage.12The articles here, focusing on the fine-scale investigation of spatial differences within the Kingdom of Hungary and adopting a longue durée perspective, try to demonstrate the feasibility of such research. We examine both development patterns and trends for several time horizons for the total area of the country by substituting GDP data with composite indicators based on causal models (using standard error of the mean, or SEM) or the human development index (HDI), and with output per area and output per capita estimations for the Middle Ages. Besides assessing the regional economic performance of the state, we also focus on spatial inequalities, which we consider as important as economic development, because even a developed country can show great internal inequalities, which is a destabilizing factor.After this overview of the relationship between history and economics/econometrics, and of methodological challenges, it is important to look also at the relationship between history and geography (or regional sciences) as a primary discipline focusing on spatiality and geographic information systems (GIS). Although attempts have been made by geographers researching modern peripheries to study the history of peripheralization in Hungary, they do not go back before 1910. This is partly because today’s problems are usually considered as the heritage of the state-socialist era or the end (due to the Trianon treaty) of the integrated economic space in 1920, and partly because of deficits in interpreting eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources and relating them to contemporary concepts and terms. Historians do have this knowledge, but they have lacked the necessary methodological skills (e.g., in GIS or multivariate statistics) to focus on spatiality. Thus, due to the limited the availability of historical databases, after the initial attempts of Géza Perjés and László Katus in Hungary, or Scott M. Eddie and John Komlos on Hungary,13 the cliometric approach faded, and the regional aspect always remained subordinated.14 Thanks to the last ten years’ efforts, settlement/municipal/parish-level databases were created for the 1300s, the 1500s, the Ottoman era, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, processing altogether more than ten million pieces of data that refer to socioeconomic and demographic phenomena.15 The present articles attempt to fill the mentioned lacuna, and, by adopting both spatial (GIS) and statistical (cliometry) approaches, introduce a new, regional approach to the history of Hungary. Though the investigated periods provide differing accessibility to surviving sources—thus different indicators have to be used in investigations—the four studies published here all focus on patterns of development levels and inequalities, use a fine-scale approach, apply single and composite indicators to show the diverse face of backwardness, and try to assess economic performance utilizing proxy variables to bypass the (unavailable) GDP-per-capita data. The deliberate coordination of separately funded research allows us to cover more than seven hundred years, providing more reliable results than GDP reconstructions for this timespan.In sum, the articles in this issue attempt to reflect on old, unresolved historical debates or challenge resolved issues, by adopting a new, transdisciplinary perspective. The methods adopted from geography and economics allow for the discussion of historical questions, at the same time providing information for modern spatial planning by identifying the historical roots of today’s peripheries and components of development.

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