84
DYNASTIC EMPIRE, r. 1765-1867
METTERNICH'".? AUSTRIA
85
long-distance merchant supplying   alongside Balkan Christians -'!§ Hungarian agricultural product1 to central European cities. In Croa- : tia the pillar of the first attempts to modernise a sluggish economy, Ambroz Vraniczany, was likewise from a merchant family dealing '|| in transporting grain from the inner plains to ihc Adriatic ports, ill On a humbler note, C. Danck, one of the first Czech-speaking entrepreneurs, learnt his trade as a simple employee in Evan and Lee's tex-j;§[ tile factory workshop. !
Industrialisation remained too weak to produce uniform patterns, i; The craft workshop and domestic industry were still numerically-ill dominant over factory enterprise but the guilds were under increase 11 ing pressure. Even before the legislation of 1809- 11, which continued!;! the undermining of their legal prerogatives begun in the eighteenth i| cenuiry, official policy aimed to blur the distinction between factory J; owners and master craftsmen by easing the. grant of citizenship..;! (Bürgerrecht) which the former required to be legally able to operate':! town-based plants. Guilds remained; in remoter parts of Hungary:::! they were even being set up for the first time. The more 1848:::! approached, however, the less they functioned on wholly traditional:;:;! lines. Hungarian research, confirmed by Austrian, has shown the ten-tip dency lor newly formed guilds to be mixed by trade, lor guild members;;! to work only part of the year at their craft and for masters to emplöylf their apprentices contrary to regulations, when they had them at all - and there were only 0.67 apprentices per master in Hungaryiulj 1846 and 1.3 in Austria in 1837, Competition was increasing between:;! guilds and inside them. Masters were being supplied with their mate-;:;;; rials by merchants or found themselves being employed by others on äü? piece-work basis - 30 or 40 at a time in the textile trade in Vienhaiflji This was the beginnings of proletarianisation. M A feature of the decline of the guild system was the movement of:;! craft: activity from the chartered "royal' towns, where it was original ally confined, to the less regulated countryside, a process following;ail little later in Hungary than in Austria. But the distinction between ' guild production and 'peasant industry' is not always easy to draw!! A guild organisation could encompass part-time peasant workers;! who wove the cotton yarn spun by their wives, or made boots and;! shoes from their own leather. Other activities might supplement;! guild crafts, like the many varieties of mason who worked in brick:::: or wood as opposed to the stone of the guild member, or the market women who sold the food most day-labourers actually bought, rather than the dearer beef or bread of the guildsman. Swelling populations:!
pursued their humble livelihoods with a moving pertinacity and Iliresource. About the south Hungarian town of Szeged in 1848 were employed 800 peasant masons of various kinds, 800 boatmen, 200 carters, 200 navvies, 120 millers, 100 tile-brick burners, 80 preparers of paprikas and 50 each ofwomen fish cutters and loaf bakers for way-Pside sale. Some of these trades had taken on corporative forms, with Pftsherrnen binding together to buy river leases, and amalgamations of !;;:hpat owners which might leave individuals employing 100 to 150 ::;: rnen. I'he most potentially dynamic branch of Hungarian peasant liudustry - textiles •- was, however, largely snuffed out by competition from the Austro-Bohemian lands. l;ii!;In these lands the already mature domestic textile industry pro-vided a base for the transition to manufacture and the industrial ::::System; The process moved at different rates as the cotton, then wool-len and finally linen branches were mechanised. Though there were 350.000 linen domestic workers in Bohemia in the mid-1830s, seven times more than there were factory workers, the former figure already represented a decline. The turning-point in the iron industry iCltne with the use of coke-fired hot ovens in the Vitkovice works in Hl;836;: for some time, however, Bohemian production remained behind that in the technically more conservative Alpine lands, with their ample reserves of charcoal. Other industries to be. mechanised included paper making and sugar refining from the late 1820s and brewing and steam-milling from the end of the period. But growth also occurred in industries organised on more traditional lines and IjSentred in the capitals Vienna and Prague: leather, glove-making and silk among them.
From this outline the wide regional variations in type and distribu-ItiSri of industry will already be apparent. One of the most developed regions was actually Lombardy-Venetia, soon to be detached from the Monarchy. In the German-Slav lands the key role of Bohemia was roming to the fore. By 1848 it had nearly half their cotton mills fahd mined 50% of their coal. While its domestic textile industry |:k;fehieved the transition to factory status, that of the Alpine lands gradually declined. Meanwhile, the Hungarian lands produced about an eighth of the Monarchy's industrial wealth in 1841: inner Hun-Igllrythen had just eleven steam engines. However, in the quickening |pB40s iron replaced food processing as the most developing sector and the fact that by that time Hungary imported as much from Austria as ii'iexported suggests its rural self-sufficiency was ending. Pest, its Iar-lf|est town, actually grew faster than Prague in this period. In Croatia,