Borza Tibor (szerk.): A Magyar Kereskedelmi és Vendéglátóipari Múzeum évkönyve 1982 (Budapest, Magyar Kereskedelmi és Vendéglátóipari Múzeum, 1982)

H. Szűcs Gitta: A Pesti Nagykereskedők Testülete

Gitta H. Szűcs THE BOARD OF WHOLESALE MERCHANTS IN PEST Wholesale trade had been more or less "free", an independent function unconnected with an adherence to the guilds, mainly practiced under a licence received or bought from the state. From the end of eighteenth century onward, the economic significance of the city of Pest had grown considerably, with more and more wholesale merchants settling there, entering the civic guildlike merchants communities, assuming a particularly increasing leading role. This section produced the factory-makers, the industrial developers, the manipulators of external trade: it became, as it were, the vehicle of the germinating capitalist development in the nineteenth century. The wholesale merchants were also engaged in commission dealings, transport, bills of exchange and other branches of the banking profession. It was particularly due to the investments of the wholesale merchants that the Chamber of Commerce was built on the Danube quay in 1826, to be followed soon by the first Hungarian Exchange and the Hungarian Commercial Bank of Pest. Our first statues for the development of trade and commerce were issued in 1840, promoting not only the free flow of the economic life but also contributing toward a new type of the cooperative spirit. The Corporation of Wholesale Merchants which opened in 1845 had recruited its members without discrimination in religion, supposing their renown was impeccable and their resources adequate. This body comprized wealthy bourgeois and Jewish merchants who had formerly left their own corporations. In the economic activities of the first independent Hungarian government, the wholesale merchants contributed their efforts (planning the organization of chambers, replacing guilds by corporations etc.). The absolutistic government which ruled after the defeat of the War of Independence, actually brought into effect these proposals by statutory ruling. Imperial patents hardly interfered with the corporation of wholesale merchants, because it had formerly been established as the results of free trading practices. A group of the wholesale merchants of Pest rose to the forefront of the Hungarian high bourgeoisie, the same men who could successfully fight to destroy the markets of the Austro—Hungarian Monarchy which had come to life after the grant 1867 Compromise. As a result of a lucrative wheat-trade, the corn-merchants rose to prominence. The highly developed wholesale trade was not primarily due to the rising number of new merchants but to the accumulation of capital. In the last third of the nineteenth century, the wholesaler's corporation developed more and more into a concentration 108