ABSTRACT
The Slovak-speaking community in Hungary was largely made up of the descendants of settlers who had migrated from the northern parts of the Kingdom of Hungary to the plains in the eighteenth century. Like the Hungarians in southern Slovakia, Hungary’s Slovaks were mostly farmers who had well-established ties to their local lands and communities. Hungarian governmental officials believed that the population exchange would have social and economic repercussions well beyond the tens of thousands of people directly involved in the exchange. They argued that resettlement would affect ‘the entire population of the state’, with the potential to cause ‘financial, social and public service problems for the masses’. The Social Department of the commission stepped in to provide the families with 5,000 forints in emergency funds and 20 kilos of sugar and promised to rectify their landlessness as soon as possible.
