Trianon and its aftermath: British geography and the ‘dismemberment’ of Hungary, c.1915-c.1922

ABSTRACT

In the wake of World War I, geographers helped advise national delegations at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference whose purpose was to delimit Europe’s new boundaries. The paper examines the role played by British geographers, specifically Alan Ogilvie and the British geographical delegation, in the Treaty of Trianon (1920) which greatly reduced Hungary’s territorial extent. Attention is paid to contemporary published work on the new Europe, particularly Marion Newbigin’s Aftermath: A Geographical Study of the Peace Terms and Ogilvie’s Boundary Settlement (1922). Assessment of manuscript diaries and correspondence reveals the complex circumstances faced by geographers engaged in peace work. The work of different practitioners – in the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), over how national boundaries should be arrived at (on either ethnic or physiographic grounds) – was hindered by inadequate map provision from British geographical institutions. This led Ogilvie to propose a new geographical body for Britain at a time when the RGS was facing criticism and when the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, not the RGS, provided the forum for discussion of the new post-war Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Hungary
• Treaty of Trianon
• World war I
• British geography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the staff of the American Geographical Society for facilitating access to the Bowman-Ogilvie correspondence, and to Eugene Rae of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), the Hungarian Geographical Museum (Érd) and the Hungarian Geographical Society for guidance over manuscript material. We acknowledge with particular thanks the family of the late Elspeth Collins, Alan Ogilvie’s granddaughter, for allowing access to the diaries of Alan Ogilvie (and those of his wife) from which we have quoted here: these are now in the Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh Library.

ORCID

Charles W. J. Withers http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5219-5653

Additional information

Funding

The research in this paper was supported by an International Exchange Fellowship Grant from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Róbert Győri's research has also been supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office of Hungary - NKFIH [contract number K 125001].