The study examines the programme of the Hungarian ministry of agriculture, designed to boost Hungarian wine export after the Treaty of Trianon. The wine industry faced both the problem of a sharp decrease of consumers, and the fact that wine export became incredibly hard because of the new borders of Hungary. Therefore, the government focused on finding new markets for Hungarian wine in Europe. The study first describes the programme in detail and investigates the political circumstances and the Hungarian government’s ways to finance this initiative, which is followed by an overview of wineries in different European towns and their incidental scandals and hardships. The second part of the study explores the origin of the Hungaria Restaurant, the Hungarian winery in London, revealing that its entire foundation process was based on political connections and friendship. The figurehead of the London winery was an intriguing person with a career that took him from Lancashire to Russia and back to England. He established companies, one after the other, and found the perfect person to be a manager of the winery. Meanwhile, the government invested more and more money in building and furnishing the restaurant itself. The Hungaria Restaurant in London was successful, but the management decided to open a new venue in a nearby town up the Thames. The Hungaria Restaurant River Club in Maidenhead became popular but never attained outstanding financial success. The study then traces the decline of the Hungarian wine export programme and the failure of the wineries involved all over Europe. In conclusion, even though the attempt eventually failed to resolve the original problem, it made the treasury accumulate significant debt.

Based on Gusztáv Haberman’s Database for the History of Szeged Burgher Fami­lies, the study examines the intergenerational mobility of a specific segment ofurban society under scrutiny. The core of the study is based on detecting themobility (or propensity for mobility) in the individuals’ profession as comparedto that of their fathers. At the same time, tendencies of immobility and of the in-tergenerational transmission of professions are also examined, which were typi-cal primarily among the sons of independent fathers, especially craftsmen andtradespeople. The study concludes that from the early nineteenth century on-wards carrying on the father’s trade was becoming a less commonly used parentalstrategy in Szeged. Parallel to this, the intergenerational mobility of professionswas on the rise. White collar workers, especially lawyers, displayed the highestdegree of professional mobility. The data show that the path of mobility for sonsof independent fathers often led them towards white collar professions and therewere no significant discrepancies between subsequent generations in this respect.The analysis of siblings’ careers indicates that the family strategy of the oldestson inheriting the father’s trade, often considered traditional, was not the onlyoption in this segment of Szeged society. The case studies show that the familieshad a more nuanced approach to choosing their children’s future profession,which probably took the skills and ability of the individual into consideration.In the examined period, the widest path of mobility in Szeged led from physi-cal labour to intellectual work. The findings suggest that the shift from independ-ent worker to employee was the prevailing intergenerational mobility trend inSzeged already before the second half of the nineteenth century. The intensity ofmobility, however, was undoubtedly increasing with the progress of time, whilethe more traditional approach to intergenerational transfer of profession, a strat-egy prioritising continuity, lost ground and was largely replaced by processes ofprofessional mobility which transgressed the boundaries of the estate system.

Nincs absztrakt.

Nincs absztrakt.

The purpose of the study is to carry out an empirical investigation into the officers and members of the National Casino. The institution was founded in Budapest in 1883 and became one of the most important scenes of the social life of the dualistic period, second only to the Hungarian Casino. The almost 800-record sample from the officers and members of the National Casino formed the database on which we have examine the age, residence, occupation, political activity and wealth status of the members. The results show that members of the National Casino were senior state employees, landed gentry, attorney, judges and intellectuals, usually without a mandate in the Parliament, and less that on third of them had estates larger than 100 acres. Beside the empirical analysis of the data, the study also attempts to analyze the self-definitions offered by various available contemporary texts. The sources for this were the texts of the lectures and ceremonial speeches held in the Casino as well as the casino reports published in contemporary newspapers. We have found significant discrepancies between these even during the dualistic period: while the members themselves were loath to refer to themselves as gentries, external observers all refer to the National Casino as the casino of the gentry. Later on the self-perception of the members and the view of outsiders become unified: during the two world wars the casino was defined as the casino of the middle classes. Comparison of these two sets of sources shows that the National Casino perceived as the casino of the gentry had actually been the meeting place of a well-definable segment of the middle class.