Marketing Industrialism and Dualism in Liberal Hungary: Expositions, 1842–1896

Abstract

The expositions stagedby Hungarian liberals in the nineteenth century—the modest Pest industrial fairs of the 1840s; the agricultural hibitions of the counterrevolutionary 1850s; the Pest agricultural exhibition in 1865; the three provincial industrial exhibitions of the 1870s in Kecskemét, Szeged, and Székesfehérvár; the successful national exhibition in Budapest in 1885; and the lavish Millennium Exhibition of 1896—conformed to the wider European and American pattern of expositions. Between 1876 and 1916 some one hundred million Americans attended expositions; over 20 percent of the U.S. population attended Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition of 1876. Over forty-eight million people passed through the turnstiles of the Paris Exposition of 1900. The three million who attended the 1896 Hungarian Millennium Exhibition were well aware that they were participating in a distinct rite of industrial civilization. Although the Hungarian numbers were far smaller, it is wrong to assume that the Hungarian nationl fairs were copycat undertakings.