FREE ROYAL CITIES OF THE DUALIST ERA
Abstract
The paper looks at what development track settlements possessing the “most aristocratic” administrative position – free royal city rank – in the feudal society followed in the bourgeois era after 1848. We can see that these cities made a rather heterogeneous group in the late feudalist times, at different levels of the urban hierarchy; this made it difficult to draw any clear-cut conclusions about their development paths. It was evident that during the decades of the dualist era (1867–1918) the total stock of the cities did not change; the position of the former free royal towns proved to be quite stable in the urban hierarchy. In Hungary it was mainly the formerly existing urban network that was modernized in the bourgeois era. This led to a “shift” within the urban network, although the total of the network did not change much. The main driving force of modernization was not manufacturing but the building out of bourgeois public administration, industry played a dominant role in the lives of only a few cities. The number of “new” industrial agglomerations located on the extraction of raw materials was few, and only a limited amount of urban functions was located into these agglomerations of population until the early 20th century. The functional and societal “shift” between the feudal and the bourgeois cities was only unquestionable on the top of urban hierarchy until the early 20th century.
