| Urbanization and the Town–Village Nexus | 1. OLD AND NEW IN THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC LIFE OF TRANSYLVANIA | Change and Tensions in Industry and Mining |
The expansion of the domestic market was driven mainly by population growth and the increasing stratification of Transylvanian society. According to a contemporary estimate, at least one-third of the population lived in a state of virtual self-sufficiency: 'Of the 140,000 people in Szilágy County, some 100,000 have no need to purchase much beyond cloaks, boots, hats, and women's trifles.'[50] {3-62.} Peasants were not alone in seeking self-sufficiency. 'Even if their houses had only three rooms, Transylvania's middle-ranking nobles would install a weaving loom in one of them so that they could produce a few bolts of linen at home.'[51]
Among the more or less affluent nobles and freeholder peasants, the trend was to adopt a new, 'bourgeois simplicity' in dress and home furnishings. Meanwhile, the bulk of the peasantry continued to develop regional variations in the traditional folk motifs of dress. The county governments had given up any attempt to constrain, by administrative measures, the peasants' taste for 'luxury,' but it became the target of growing criticism, and the border-guard villages of Naszód would have preferred to curtail the 'extravagance' of women. Embroidered cushions, painted pitchers, and icons painted on glass had long been regarded as symbols of wealth in Romanian homes.
The interiors of more recently constructed homes in the Székelyföld reflected the changing times. Once, 'their walls were lined with racks holding earthenware pitchers and plates;' now, there were portraits of popular public figures, and there was a book on the table.[52] People tried to emulate the style of the more privileged strata; they would buy furniture similar to that of the urban middle class, and borrow some elements of traditional noble or bourgeois dress. Particularly in the case of Romanian women, an extravagant style of dress contrasted sharply with an otherwise penurious lifestyle. At a time when men still wore moccasins, women in Hunyad and Doboka counties, and other places as well, sported red boots which, in rainy weather, they carried to church. Boots had to be purchased in the market, and the same was the case with the coloured and white thread for embroidering shirts and pillows, unless a dyeing shop happened to be located nearby. Fur, silk, and, in some northern parts of Transylvania, calico were purchased to make underskirts, or shirts on which collars could be sewn. There were 'noble shirts,' or, in the parlance of Fogaras, 'German {3-63.} shirts,' as well as 'serf's shirts' or 'Romanian shirts.' Few people could afford to replace their rough felt garments with clothing made of textiles produced in Brassó, Nagyszeben, or Austria, but most of them did have the means to buy the products of peasant craftsmen.
Affluent noblemen and burghers could afford to buy Austrian products for their families, while priests, teachers, less affluent nobles and burghers, minor officials, and the wealthier peasants made do with the products of domestic craftsmen. The quality of Transylvanian goods was improving. Back in the 18th century, locally-produced cloth was of such poor quality that it was rejected even for ordinary soldiers' uniforms. Now, when the military headquarters invited bids in the press, Saxon craftsmen could meet the required standards. The local industry did face stiff competition from Austrian goods, whose lower price was not entirely offset by the high cost of shipping. When Slovak merchants, from Upper Hungary, undercut the prices charged by local dealers for Viennese products, they were banned from the monthly markets in the towns; the measure certainly harmed the Viennese producers, but it did not stifle the competition. Austrian cloth was 5–6 percent cheaper than that produced in Brassó, which was more durable but less attractive. Yet even when price and quality were similar, people preferred Austrian cloth, for it was considered more exclusive, and the factor of durability had become less important. Only the less affluent burghers would wear clothes inherited from fathers and grandfathers. Well-to-do burghers tried to keep up with the latest German and French fashions. In the 1840s, even in the smaller Saxon towns, like Szászrégen, tailors would busily refashion coats in the English style, and women's dress followed the fashion depicted in Ungar, a Pest newspaper. Thanks to lower transportation costs, the domestic production of common consumer goods, such as copies of Viennese-style furniture, stoneware substitutes for porcelain, paper, and glass, remained profitable.
{3-64.} Across Europe, higher prices for grain and greater trading activity boosted the purchasing power of the agrarian population. This emerging agricultural boom had little direct impact on Transylvania, but it did benefit Transylvania's exports. Peasant handicrafts, such as rough felt blankets, withstood competition from Austrian producers and sold well in southern Hungary, Croatia, and Slavonia. Some 200,000–250,000 ornamented cloaks were produced annually at Debrecen from felt produced in Nagydisznód. (Many of Debrecen's cloakmakers committed themselves to use nothing but Saxon felt.) Thick 'Debrecen blankets' were made in villages around Brassó, and the felt shipped from Nagyszeben to northern Hungary evidently met a demand for traditional products. Pottery from Torda was exported even as far as Galicia.
In markets beyond the Carpathians, 'in the Romanian principalities as well as in Bulgaria,' lifestyles and shifts in fashion worked to the 'advantage' of Transylvanian industry;[53] in fact, Transylvanian exports had long satisfied popular demand in those regions for traditional goods, to the point that they acquired a 'national character.'[54] Moldavia and Wallachia were granted a considerable autonomy after the Russian–Turkish War of 1828. They eliminated the Turks' monopolistic control over trade and opened Danubian ports to free trade; as a result, there was steady growth in exports of wool, grain, tallow and other agricultural goods, and in imports of industrial products, shipped in and out on English, French, and Austrian vessels. Romanian boyars could at last divest themselves of their oriental caftan, and they did not have to don it again, as in the 1790s, after the withdrawal of Russian and Austrian troops. They had a preference for goods from western Europe, Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia; most of the French and English products were procured at the Leipzig fair, and growing use was made of Danubian shipping. Still, Prince Ghica would correspond on paper produced in the mill of Rudolf Orghidan, a Romanian merchant at Brassó; stoneware from Batiz and Brassó was a common substitute for porcelain in boyar households; and soldiers as {3-65.} well as civil servants would continue to favour the blue felt garments produced in Brassó.
Brassó's Saxon press, which kept close watch over changes in the market, reported that the demand for shoes and boots was 'rising commensurately with the growing preference shown by people [beyond the Carpathians] for European fashions.'[55] More affluent boyars preferred 'Leipzig products' (which were presumably copied in Brassó), while the poorer social strata focused on 'Brassó products,' including felt, cotton linen, ironware, scythes, glass, painted chests, stoneware, pottery, candles, icons painted on glass, boots, and shoes. The Austrian consul in Galati noted with some satisfaction that 'in every village, one finds merchants from Brassó and the products of industrious Brassó craftsmen.'[56] 'Brassó product' was used as a trademark, and its application was not limited to the products of that town. Transylvanian exports bearing that identification included felt produced in villages near Brassó, boots and painted chests from Székelyföld, and rope from Szászrégen. Even some English and Austrian products found a better reception if they were marketed as Brassó products.
Thus economic development beyond the Carpathians benefited Transylvanian producers, mainly those located in the southern part of the country; it had been said that the continued development of Transylvanian industry depended on backwardness in the neighbouring regions, but, for the moment, this prediction was belied by events. However, competition of western goods was beginning to have an impact in this market, foreshadowing a phenomenon that was already in evidence in Hungary and Transylvania. The demand for Transylvanian products was progressively limited to certain items of popular consumption; Austrian and other western producers were taking a growing share of the mass market, for even peasant households took to manufactured goods, such as the thread and cotton linen used for national dress. Later, the fledgling Romanian industry displaced Transylvanian exports in the local market.
{3-66.} The terms of trade took an unfavourable turn for Transylvania, for industrial prices fell and agricultural prices rose. In the 1830s and 1840s, customs records show that Transylvania's exports were still increasing, at a rate higher than that of the Habsburg empire as a whole, and also higher than that of aggregate exports to the Turkish empire. However, Transylvania's share of the empire's foreign trade stood at lower levels than in the preceding decades. Around 80 percent of Transylvania's exports to the east went to the two Romanian principalities. Most of the remaining 10 percent went to the 'Bulgarian' region, but there were also sales of rope and linen to the Turkish army, and of beaver hats to Constantinople. According to contemporary estimates, the annual trade of Brassó, Transylvania's commercial gateway to the east, with the trans-Carpathian region was as great as its trade with Hungary and Austria. The merchants 'work harder than 15 or 20 years ago, but they earn more money as well.'[57]
The community of traders, numbering between 1,300 and 1,400, was marked and motivated by the tensions between the old and the new. At its core, there were the traditional ethnic clusters that enjoyed special privileges and engaged in long-distance trade reaching beyond Transylvania's borders. These groups were distinguished more by trade routes than by products. A group would enjoy a 'naturally' monopolistic advantage in the regions along its trade route, and its success depended on the state of demand in these regions. However, these circumstances did not remain static; to a growing extent, the traders had to find a place in the emerging national communities.
The Armenians' specialties were cattle trade and tanning. They were skilled in the production of morocco leather, although this became less significant as the fashion shifted from boots to shoes. Their trade in Moldavian cattle, some of which supplied the Viennese market, also suffered a decline. The settlements of Ar-menian merchants and tanners in the Székelyföld, at Gyergyó-szentmiklós {3-67.} and Csíkszépvíz, remained relatively prosperous, but commercial activity declined in Erzsébetváros and stagnated in Szamosújvár despite the fact that both localities had been granted the status of free royal town; still, the merchants preserved their preeminence in Transylvania's trade with Vienna and Pest. Merchant-tenants who fattened Moldavian beef cattle on the Hungarian plain did well enough to join the ranks of the landed nobility and aristocracy.
Transylvanian Armenians were known to be attached to their heritage. When one Sir Rafael, an Englishman of Armenian extraction, sought out his fellow Armenians in Transylvania, he was delighted to discover that they had preserved their mother tongue; he proceeded, in the mid-1840s, to found a high school at Erzsébetváros, and he even promised to establish a technical university in Szamosújvár. At the same time, the Armenian delegates to the diet would proudly proclaim that their people were part of the Hungarian nation, and that only some of their 'lower strata' had yet to learn Hungarian. Throughout Transylvania, Armenian merchants became integrated with the Hungarian middle class; and so, whereas Hungarian merchants were few and far between in the Transylvania of the 1820s, visitors from Hungary now reported in some amazement on 'the friendly impression made by the Hungarian names of merchants' in Kolozsvár.[58] Armenians entered into partnership with aristocrats in the early initiatives to establish manufacturing enterprises, and they naturally sought to join the nobility. As a token of social integration, the Armenian Menyhárt Szábel was nominated for a title of nobility by the 1841–43 diet. Yet this popular merchant was also the target of a satirical ditty: 'With five pennies in the pocket / His old father opened a shop / And filled the country with wooden dolls. / The lords' prodigality / And the burghers' stupidity / Allowed him to become a great capitalist.'[59]
Such success was beyond the reach of the less affluent Armenians, who roamed like the 'spirit of the masses' around the {3-68.} country, peddling the wares they had acquired on the Pest market. The two major Saxon towns both had a trading company of some 20–30 members, among whom the Armenians and German merchants from northern Hungary came to outnumber the long-established burghers; after the mid-1700s, the latter gradually lost their grip even over commerce within the town. These 'new Saxon' merchants had to content themselves largely with the domestic market, for in trade with the east, they preserved a competitive advantage only in iron products.
Merchants trading in Austrian goods had to acknowledge, with some remorse, the prevailing opinion that their activities damaged the country's economy. On the other hand, the south-Transylvanian merchants who traded in lands beyond the Carpathians proudly proclaimed that, by importing raw materials and exporting finished products, they were enriching the country. The fate of Greek merchants was closely tied to the vagaries of the cotton market. The Napoleonic blockade had cut off Macedonia from the European market for cotton, which found alternative suppliers. In the more developed provinces of the Habsburg empire, a booming cotton industry was already importing its raw material from Egypt and America. These changes brought momentary benefit to Transylvanian industry, but the respite proved to be of short duration. Transylvania's imports of cotton from the east (and, presumably, consumption of cotton) trebled from the end of the eighteenth century through the 1830s, rising from a hundred to over three hundred metric tons, but then the volume became stable. In the meantime, Transylvania's share of the empire's cotton imports declined, from 8–10 percent around 1800 to less than two percent in the 1840s.
The Napoleonic blockade also dealt a death blow to the byway of Levantine trade that led through Transylvania. Thus, in the 1820s, a major trader like Constantin Hagi-Pop would choose to transfer his head office from Nagyszeben to Vienna. Hagi-Pop's son became director of the National Bank in Vienna and, upon {3-69.} being nominated by the diet that met between 1841 and 1843 at Kolozsvár, he was ennobled by the emperor; in 1846–47, he promoted the establishment of an Austrian Levantine commercial society, with head office in Bucharest, explaining to the Viennese political elite that 'our India and China' had to be sought in the Danubian principalities.[60]
As cotton imports levelled off, so did the number of Greek merchants in Transylvania. Turkish subjects gradually drifted away; a knowledge of Greek was no longer essential in eastern trade and, following the national uprising of 1821, Greeks lost their positions of economic power in the Turkish empire. In the 1820s, Romanians in Brassó would complain that Greek merchants from the Turkish empire effectively reduced them to the status of peddlers. Twenty years later, the Romanians could claim that they dominated a trading network spanning Vienna, Trieste, Pest, and Constantinople. By the 1840s, some three hundred Romanians had established residence in the centre of Brassó, outnumbering the Greeks by two to one; over a hundred Romanian merchants had won civic rights; and twice as many Romanians as Greeks (including Bulgarians who identified with them) were engaged in {3-70.} trade with the principalities. Brassó's Romanians had become the strongest group of traders in Transylvania.
The brisk economic life of Brassó may account for the fact that, in contrast to other Saxon towns, and despite the resistance of the municipal government and guilds, a few Jewish craftsmen and merchants (who traded locally and exported wool to Vienna) managed to get established in the town. As noted, petitions from these same Jews led the government to improve the status of Transylvania's Jewish population, only a minority of which had commerce as its primary occupation.
In Hungary, grain dealers had come to play a key role in commerce, but in Transylvania, the economy was so decentralized that, until the mid-1850s, Kolozsvár had no grain dealer serving the trade with Vienna and Pest. Transylvanian landowners' agricultural exports to the west were handled by merchants located in Hungary. The wholesalers of Gyulafehérvár who shipped salt to Szeged on vessels chartered from the treasury were commonly denounced as 'speculators.'
Of the capital accumulated through trading, little was invested in industrial development. Those who did have such assets tended to lease mines, ironworks, paper mills, and glassworks, and employ peasant craftsmen. According to the Romanian press, the latter could earn 'marvellous profits,' although the peasant commodity producers — except for some cotton spinners — were not subject to the levels of subordination that characterize the Verlag system; merchants did not own the tools of production, and if some did supply the craftsmen with raw material, they did so on credit or for payment in cash or kind. Following to the rules of the Kaufsystem, merchants preferred to acquire handicraft products in the town and village markets.
In confronting guild craftsmen, members of the new commercial elite were not necessarily acting as the advance guard of a bourgeois transformation. Rather, they were intent on promoting a new form of entrepreneurship. In denouncing the guilds' right to pre-emptive purchase, they invoked the modern principle of free enterprise, but the fierceness of their attacks owed more to the difficulty in competing with guilds for the goods that peasant craftsmen sold at town fairs; when such goods, such as broadcloth, were also produced by guilds, the latter had first right of purchase. Yet the same traders who preached the virtues of the market to producers had a stranglehold on trade with the east and owed much of their prosperity to the work of guild and peasant craftsmen.
| Urbanization and the Town–Village Nexus | 1. OLD AND NEW IN THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC LIFE OF TRANSYLVANIA | Change and Tensions in Industry and Mining |