Cottage Industry in the Hungarian Cooperative System before 1948

Abstract

The cooperative system that emerged in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century was very different from the much earlier processes in Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, including Hungary, the establishment and management of cooperatives was under the control of large capitalists and the state, and was closely linked to nation-building efforts. From the second half of the nineteenth century, the cottage industry movement developed with economic, nation-building, and folk-art preservation objectives. The institutional system of cottage industry included associations, alliances, central governing bodies, and cooperatives. In Hungarian academic research, cooperatives and the cottage industry movement are not linked, although both their aims and their organizations were closely related. This study reveals that the movement was integrated into the cooperative institutional system in several ways, and that the centralizing measures, that were increasingly evident in the cottage industry during the first half of the twentieth century, went hand in hand with the cooperative movement. Exploring these links is essential to understanding folk art, applied folk art, and the cottage industry cooperative system that developed from the 1950s onwards.