The Anatomy of a Colonization Frontier: The Banat of Temešvar

Abstract

If, as Meinig has suggested, the essential significance of colonization is that it produces a radical change and a totally new geography, there can be few regions in Europe which illustrate the process more vividly than the middle Danube plains, lying astride the modern borders of Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania. Over four centuries the varied strategic and economic potentials of these countries have been viewed by successive individuals and state administrations from different standpoints with the result that each, whether peasant or feudal magnate, imperial official or socialist planner, has left his interpretation as one of a series of veneers or imprints on earlier cultural strata. Historically, the primary guiding consideration in formation of policy was strategic, as has generally been the case; yet beneath this politico-administrative structural level were numerous economic and social frameworks of action which in many ways achieved more enduring tangible expression in community and landscape alike. Within the concept of these two organizational levels, this paper will trace the emergence of the region from sparsely settled wilderness to dynamic multi-national agrarian complex in the period from the early sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century.