Nagy János: Rendi ellenzék és kormánypárt az 1751. évi országgyűlésen - Disszertációk Budapest Főváros Levéltárából 7. (Budapest, 2020)

The opposition of the estates and the loyalists at the Diet of 1750 (summary)

hand, it involved a stricter (compared to earlier practice) control over the election of county officials in the counties where there was no lord-lieutenant in office. On the other hand, it became obvious that Vienna meant the lord-lieutenants to provide them with information concerning the public life of the county and the perceived injustices of the locals. As for the main tendencies of small changes in the institutional history of the delegation process of county deputies, these reflect an increase of power and self-evaluation of the bene possessionati within local authorities. The increased importance of the instructions given to deputies, the increased frequency of correspondence concerning diet-related topics between individual counties and the fact that misappropriations of the deputies’ stipends were more and more successfully pulled off all sit pretty in this process.

Debates at the diet

As for the history of specific debates at the diet, I have also managed to uncover hitherto unknown correlations. The participants of the palatine election of 1751 were not but the puppets of Vienna, but people with distinct agency, goals and interests. Also, there were no obvious winners and losers, because even the losers got compensated in the form of titles or positions. The agenda of the Diet of 1751 was dominated by financial issues, but it was not only the question of taxation where the court and the estates didn’t see eye to eye, but also concerning the grievances in trade policy. Using the pretext of addressing these grievances, the estates attempted, on the one hand, to get a say in the regulation of Hungarian trade policy (especially custom duties) — which amounted to trying to appropriate a regal privilege. On the other hand, they could demand the redressing of their grievances in trade policy in exchange for the increase of taxes. Parallel with the diet, negotiations were going on in Vienna between the Hungarian government authorities and the representatives of the Royal Chamber and the Directorate of Trade concerning the reforming of the system of customs duties of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Kingdom of Hungary within it. The conference partly met the demands of the estates, recognising the duty exemption of the estates and decreasing the customs duties on Hungarian agrarian products. These measures made it into the duties decrees of 1754-55. It complemented the importance of all this that during the economic expansion during the War of Austrian Succession, after the 1740s, the Hungarian nobility got more and more involved in the agrarian trade and thus became more and more interested in these developments.

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