Magyarország történeti helységnévtára. Pest-Pilis-Solt megye és a Kiskunság (1773-1808) byAranka Szaszkóné SinReview by: Martyn RadyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Jul., 1989), pp. 482-483Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4210061 .

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482 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

key dependence on Western technology, the inelasticities of supply and demand which tend to stymie efforts to increase exports to the West - all of these obstacles to economic development are as oppressively present in the I980s as they were in the I920S and I930s. Of course, the power-bloc and institutional changes of the immediate post-war period had an enormous impact, as Wtodzimierz Brus shows us in Volume iII. But they did not solve many problems.

The editors of The Economic History ofEastern Europe chose to bring their study to an end in the year of the Helsinki agreement, as representing the institu- tionalization of the post-war division of Europe. This was an obvious mile- stone. Yet much has changed since 1975, and Harriet Matejka, for example, in her admirable chapter in Volume in on post-war foreign trade systems, might have ended on a less positive evaluation of the Yugoslav experience if she had brought the analysis up to the debt-service crises of the early I98os. More generally, I found myself wondering about the accessibility of this work to undergraduates. It is very long, and it is not always an easy read. Yet it is the only serious economic history of Eastern Europe available. When the project is completed, might not the authors think it appropriate to try to persuade one of their number to produce a concise, one-volume summary of the proceedings? My students, at least, would be enormously grateful if they did. School of European Studies DAVID A. DYKER University ofSussex

Szaszkone Sin, Aranka (ed.). Magyarorszag tortineti helysegnevtdra. Pest-Pilis-Solt megye es a Kiskunsag (1773-I808). Kozponti statisztikal hivatal, Budapest, I988. 280 pp. Tables. Maps. Indexes.

THE present gazetteer is the second in the series published by the Library and Documentation Service of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, and follows hard upon the latter's survey of Fejer county (reviewed SEER, 66, I988, pp. 29I-92). The new work, a study of the place-names and topography of Pest-Pilis-Solt county and of the Kiskunsag, meets the exacting standards set by its predecessor and closely adheres to the prescribed format of the series. The orderly, columnar arrangement of data makes it possible for the reader not only to trace variations in local toponymy but also to determine population size, landownership, religious and linguistic affiliation in some 700 settlements on the western Alfold.

What makes this work of particular value to the historian is the inclusion of agricultural data derived from the extant cadastral surveys of Joseph II's reign. As a consequence, variations in land cultivation may be established with reasonable accuracy and set alongside the material from the same region, but from the earlier Turkish period, published recently in Gyula Kaldy- Nagy's A budai szandzsak 1546-i590 evi osszeirasai (Budapest, I 985). Long-term trends and changes in the rural economy may thus be extrapolated in a way which has hitherto been largely impossible.

Pest, Pilis, and Solt were amalgamated in I492 and I569 as a single county, to which the Kiskunsag was joined only in I876. It is thus appropriate for the gazetteer, which relies largely upon information derived from the late

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REVIEWS 483

eighteenth century, to consider Little Cumania as a separate regional entity. Clearly, however, by i 8oo the distinctive features of the Kiskunsaig had all but been lost. The tide of resettlement, led in the main by immigrants from Baranya county and from Slavonia, had substantially altered the ethnic composition of the region. In particular, the I745 redemptio, which ended serfdom in the Kiskunsaig and re-established 'Cumanian' forms of self- government, proved so enticing that the original population was soon over- whelmed in the scramble for free titles. The course of this transformation remains outside the scope of the present work, which makes its task one of enumeration rather than of elucidation. Nevertheless, the information given on such settlements as Kiskunfelegyhaza, Halas and Dorozsma may be instructively contrasted with the material provided in the first volume of the series on their sleepier Transdanubian counterparts.

This excellent series promises to transform historians' understanding of the Hungarian countryside. The imminent publication of additional volumes on Nograd, Arva, Heves-Kiilso-Szolnok and the Jaszsag may thus be eagerly awaited by all those with an interest in the agrarian society and economy of the late eighteenth-century Habsburg lands. London MARTYN RADY

Paindi, Pal. "Gespenster" gehen in Ungarn um. Die utopisch-sozialistischen und friihkommunistischen Ideen in Ungarn bis i848-i849. Akademiai kiado, Buda- pest, I987. 65I pp. Notes. Index. ?36.50.

THIs book is an abridged version of the author's two-volume Hungarian work, first published in 1972, on the rise and development of early socialist and communist ideas in Hungary before the revolution of I848. Although he claims that it is rather a broad survey than a close study, he has cast his net deep as well as wide, and has discovered some intriguing details in forgotten journals and newspapers of the period and produced a substantial work of Marxist scholarship.

The early chapters define terms. 'Utopian socialism and communism represent the peak in the history of utopian ideas' (p. 28). They also set the subject in a European background, with particular reference to Owen, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Lamennais. This was a period when young Hun- garian reformers travelled widely in search of new ideas and inventions, hence a chapter which deals appropriately with travel-accounts, for these were effective propaganda. It is remarkable that Bol6ni Farkas's account of his visit to America should ever have appeared in print, though it cost the censor his job and delayed the publication of Farkas's equally revealing travels in Western Europe for over a century (pp. 63-69). Other reformers, like J6zsef E6tvos, incorporated their observations in separate studies on social problems.

This was a time when new ideas were debated in print with relative freedom, and it is no surprise that early socialist and communist ideas filtered through into what was, after all, the main concern of the day: political and national reform. The author is well aware that his theme is peripheral to this, and from

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