ABSTRACT
As a consequence of the relatively small industrial sector in Hungary, nearly two-thirds of the population of the country lived off the land before the First World War. Statistical records around the turn of the century reveal that agriculture provided a living for 65.7 per cent of the overall population in 1900, and for 61.9 per cent in 1910. If the noble owners of large and medium-sized estates and the agrarian intelligentsia are excluded, and the intermediate groups fluctuating between agriculture and the other branches of economic life are included, one can assume that the proportion of peasantry to the total population amounted to between 62 and 66 per cent in those years.
