ABSTRACT
For a long time industry in Hungary meant craft industry. At the end of the nineteenth century 44 per cent of the industrial population were still independent masters and another 44 per cent were employed in small workshops, while factory workers made up only 12 per cent of those employed in industry. Moreover, guilds continued to exist until 1872 although their authority to control trade was abolished after 1860. Nevertheless, Hungarian city archives are full of complaints from the end of the eighteenth century about the decline of the crafts and of grievances by guild masters.1 Indeed, the position of urban artisans was shaken long before the expansion of home industrialization by both the influx of manufactured goods from the western part of the Habsburg Empire and by the development of rural crafts. These were the two factors which undermined the guild artisans' former monopoly on producing industrial goods, a monopoly which previously rested far more on the country's underdeveloped economy than on guild restrictions.
