Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
From City to Metropolis (1849-1919)
entirely on a pontoon-bridge and ferryboats. In the winter months with ice on the river, all the connections between Buda and Pest would be severed. The establishment of a permanent link was indispensable for their union. On the initiative of István Széchenyi, who was personally mainly instrumental in the establishment of a united capital, the construction of the first permanent bridge was begun in 1839 to the plans of a British engineer, William Tierney Clark. The Chain Bridge was completed in 1849 and the final obstacle to unification removed. One of the last measures of the Government of the Revolution and of the War of Independence was the creation of the united capital: on 24th of June 1849 it decreed the merging of Buda, Pest and Óbuda into the capital city of Budapest. From City to Metropolis (1849-1919) (Selection of documents covering the period: IX-XVI) In 1849 the combined military power of the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs defeated the Hungarian forces in their struggle for independence. The reactionary régime which followed, however, found itself unable to reverse the achievements of the bourgeois revolution which had provided the economic and social basis for the struggle: Hungary was irrevocably set on the path of capitalist development. On the Road to Union In this development Pest-Buda played an increasingly important part after as well as before 1849. The Hapsburgs failed to reduce the administrative and economic importance of the sister cities—especially Pest. Within the centralized Austrian Empire, governed on absolutist lines, and the corresponding overall Imperial customs area, the two cities acted as a national centre for the Hungarian market which had already begun to develop before 1848. It was in order to thwart this development that the two cities, which had already been legally united in the last weeks of the struggle for independence, were again separated, and plans were made for the railway network to avoid Pest if possible. But in the end the railway network had to be adapted to the trade routes which had centred for centuries on Pest- Buda, and the increasing traffic on the Danube continued to concentrate Hungarian trade and commerce (as an agrarian country, this was primarily the trade in agricultural and farming products) on Pest-Buda. By the beginning of the sixties the Pest trade in agricultural and natural products had a dominant position throughout the Monarchy, and the capital accumulated as a result was invested in industrial enterprises which did not fear competition from the more advanced Austrian industries. Based on the raw materials of the Pest produce trade, the merchants of the two cities established between 1855 and 1873 the largest flour-milling industry by steam in Europe, which by the end of the sixties was already exporting abroad as far as South America. The distilling industry had also grown to considerable proportions. To satisfy the increasing need of the country for agricultural machinery and transport vehicles, 37
