Ihász István - Pintér János szerk.: Történeti Muzeológiai Szemle: A Magyar Múzeumi Történész Társulat Évkönyve 8. (Budapest, 2008)
I. Tanulmányok - Paládi-Kovács Attila: Magyarország nemzetiségei és etnikai térszerkezete a 18. században
The Nationalities and Ethnic Geography of Hungary in the 18 1 Century Attila Paládi-Kovács A knowledge of 18 n century demographic conditions is hampered by the lack of censuses extending to the entire population of the country. The first Hungarian national census took place in 1784-1787 at the order of Emperor Joseph II. The first significant national source about ethnic geography is a census prepared in 1773 which highlights the indigenous languages and denominations county by county and village by village. It does not contain data or accurate ratios, but the order of the list of denominations and ethnic groups follows that of population numbers. This source appeared in print in 1920 with the title Lexicon universorum Regni Hungáriáé locorum populosonun anno 1773 ojficio.se confection. It is on the basis of this that various people (e.g. Anton Petrov 1924, István Kniezsa 1939) have drawn ethnic geographical maps of Hungary at that time. Ignác Acsády's Magyarország népessége a Pragmatica Sanctio korában, 1720-21 ("The Population of Hungary at the time of the Pragmatica Sanctio..."), published in 1896, was a pioneering work presenting the country's population on the basis of national taxation inventories carried out in 1715 and 1720-21. Due to the feudal nature of society Acsády was forced to complement statistical calculations with estimates. Taking everything into account, he established the 1720 population of Hungary (excluding Croatia and Slavonia) to be 2,582,000. His data and estimating methods were thoroughly revised by later research as the science of historic statistics and demography developed in the 20 th century in Hungary. By the 1930s the school of ethno-demography had made its appearance. This branch of science now contains literature to fill a library, with special attention having been paid to the history of the 18 lh century population and the formation of ethnic proportions. István Szabó's monograph, which appeared in 1941, emphasised the dangerous drop in the population in the 16 lh and 17 lh centuries. He discovered that in around 1720 the population was around 3.2 million. This figure is considerably exceeds the above-cited data of Acsády (by about 600,000). Szabó also analysed the ethnic structure of the population. He established that in the two centuries of Turkish wars and occupation the number of Hungarians dropped to 1.5 million, while the number of non-Hungarians rose to 1.7 million. Further research resulted in the discovery of new sources and once again the 1720 population of Hungary was corrected. Imre Wellmann's summary, published in 1989, places the 1720 population of Hungary (including Croatia and Slavonia) at around 4.4 million. Within this the number of Hungarians is 1.7 million, the combined number of nonHungarians being 2.6 million. In the course of the 70 years between 1720 and 1790 the population increased by 131.15%, rising to nearly 10 million people. Within this the number of Hungarians rose to 3.1 million, while the number of non-Hungarians reached 68 million. There were three main origins to the rise in population of this long period: a) natural reproduction, b) voluntary immigration and infiltration and c) the organised settlement of foreigners. Colonisation was overwhelmingly determined by the policy of the Habsburg dynasty. Those benefiting were primarily Catholics and German-speaking settlers. These were followed by Serbian and Romanian soldier-peasants, who could be used for protecting the borderlands against the Ottoman Empire. The Roman Catholic bishops with interests in the colonisation as well as the Hungarian aristocracy diluted with foreign landowners who had received estates made the preferences of the House of Habsburg as their own. At the end of
