Körmöczi Katalin szerk.: Historical Exhibition of the Hungarian National Museum 3 - From the End of the Turkish Wars to the Millennium - The history of Hungary in the 18th and 19th centuries (Budapest, 2001)

Rooms 9 to 15 present to the visitor relics 7 from Hungary's history in the 18th and 19th centuries. The basic issue of the period which followed the expulsion of the Turks was the rebuilding of the country, the starting up of bourgeois development, and the ensuring of an independent national life. In a Europe undergoing change, a new balance of power developed between a strong, bourgeois British empire at one extreme and a decaying Ottoman empire with oriental, feudal features at the other. It was at this time that independent, bourgeois national states came into existence in the Central European region, where British, French, Russian, German and Habsburg interests all exerted influence. For the Hungarians the decisive events of the period were the Rákóczi war of independence against Habsburg absolutism; the 1848-49 war of independence; the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, which created the machinery for the dualist state known as Austria-Hungary; and the Versailles peace settlement (part of which was the so-called Treaty of Trianon) which brought the First World War to a close and which liquidated this state unit.