Petrović, Nikola: Hajózás és gazdálkodás a Közép-Duna-Medencében a merkantilizmus korában (Vajdasági Tudományos és Művészeti Akadémia, Novi Sad - Történelmi Intézet, Beograd, 1982)

Summary

The labour shortage and the difficulties encountered during the construction of the inlet and outlet works demanded yet another increase of the investments and still more loans. Although there are no records from the annual shareholders meeting of 5 March, 1799, it may nevertheless be assumed that the management had a good deal of trouble explaining why the optimistic forecast of the'preceding year had again come to nothing. During 1798 and 1799 the 'Vienna head office for the canal was under constant pressure from the shareholders. Moreover, various rumours were spreading among them which only made the raising of the loan more difficult. The shareholders themselves were not prepared to extricate the company. None of them wanted to visit Backa to see for himself the difficulties the field management had to force.

However, the new management traied hard to make things orderly and systematic. It worked out regulations for the operative field engineering team and the duties of each of its members. There had been no such thing at the time of the Kiss brothers. These regulations consisted of 34 items and certainly represented a big step towards a putting the affairs of the company to rights. This matter is dealt with in some detail. One of the items was that the director of the project (F. von Redl) was required to send regular monthly reports to Vienna. A fair number of these reports has been preserved and was used in writing this monograph. These reports were first supplemented by the financial director in Vienna, Heimerle, with a report on his own activities, and then relayed to the shareholders and the royal commissioner. Thanks to this fact, it has been possible to reconstruct the efforts Heimerle put in to raising secure credit for the company, whose solvency had been gravely undermined. However, it seems that the venture no longer suffered from the lack of money.

Redl and Heimerle were also given the task of studying the problem of the future dividents; these had been estimated by J.Kiss at 10, 12 and even as much as 20 pet of the capital. But the new management thought that a „normal" interest of 5—6 pet would be more realistic.

I also review again the ever-present problem of labour, discussing in some detail the field management's bid to get all available unpaid serf labour forced to work on the canal. It asked several Hungarian counties to take new measures to provide the necessary labour for the construction site. In Order to give full weight to-these measures. Count Aponyi addressed the emperor himself, and explained to him the whole matter. The request for soldier labour was rejected, but on the other two points the emperor offered his full support. In this way, tough somewhat tardily, as many as 6000 administratively recruited men appeared on the site around the middle of November 1798. Many had field back home, but nevertheless about 2000 were forcefully mobilized and the same number of hired men remained on the site. This work force was quite satisfactory for the late season.

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