Hungarian Geography between 1870 and 1920: Negotiating Empire and Coloniality on the Global Semiperiphery

Abstract

Going beyond the conventional approach that locates imperial geographies at either the center or periphery of overseas colonization, this article focuses on coloniality in fin de siècle Hungary to examine the complex negotiation of the colonial project on the global semiperiphery. As a junior partner in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary was simultaneously both an object of Western Europe’s orientalizing gaze and an agent of its own civilizing mission on the nation’s periphery and in the Balkans. Adopting a decolonial framework, we investigate how Hungarian geographers fit themselves into the colonial paradigm and examine their shifting and ambiguous relationship to colonial notions. Beginning with the institutionalization of Hungarian geography in the 1870s and ending with the collapse of Austria-Hungary after World War I, we explore this evolving relationship in light of three factors: (1) the attitudes of Hungarian geographers toward Western imperialism in general and Austro-Hungarian imperialism in the Balkans in particular; (2) the diverse perspectives of Hungarian geographers as thinkers embedded in an epistemic community on the global semiperiphery; and (3) their perspectives on ethno-nationalist conceptualizations of national space. Offering critical insight into the history of fin de siècle Hungarian geography, our study also opens the possibility for comparative discussions regarding the semiperipheral coloniality of other broadly similar cases and the decolonizing of semiperipheral geographies and their pasts.

本文超越了将帝国地理定位于海外殖民中心或边缘的传统方法, 关注19世纪末匈牙利的殖民性质, 探讨了全球半边缘国家殖民活动的复杂关系。作为奥匈帝国的初级伙伴, 匈牙利是西欧东方化的对象, 也是在其周边国家和巴尔干半岛开展文明使命的推动者。我们采用去殖民化框架, 调查了匈牙利地理学家如何融入殖民模式, 研究了他们与殖民观念的动态和模糊关系。从19世纪70年代匈牙利地理的制度化开始, 直到第一次世界大战后奥匈帝国的崩溃, 我们从三个因素来探讨这种不断演变的关系: (1)匈牙利地理学家对西方帝国主义、特别是巴尔干地区奥匈帝国主义的态度；(2)作为认识论领域中的思想家, 匈牙利地理学家对全球半边缘国家的不同视角；(3)他们对民族空间的民族主义观念。我们为深入了解19世纪末匈牙利地理学史提供了批判性见解, 为采用比较方法去探讨类似地区的半边缘殖民性质、半边缘地区的去殖民化及其历史, 提供了可能性。

Más allá de la mirada convencional que ubica a las geografías imperiales en el centro o en la periferia de la colonización ultramarina, este artículo está enfocado en la colonialidad de la Hungría del fin de siècle, para examinar la compleja negociación del proyecto colonial en la semiperiferia global. Como socio menor del Imperio Austrohúngaro, a Hungría le correspondió desempeñar simultáneamente un papel de objeto de la mirada orientalizadora de la Europa Occidental, y de agente de su propia misión civilizadora en su periferia nacional y en los Balcanes. A partir de un marco decolonial, investigamos el modo como los geógrafos húngaros se encajan a sí mismos dentro del paradigma colonial, y examinamos su relación cambiante y ambigua con las nociones coloniales. Empezando con la institucionalización de la geografía húngara en la década de los 1870 y terminando con el colapso de Austria-Hungría al terminar la Primera Guerra Mundial, exploramos esta relación evolutiva a la luz de tres factores: (1) las actitudes de los geógrafos húngaros hacia el imperialismo occidental, en general, y el imperialismo austrohúngaro en los Balcanes, en particular; (2) las diversas perspectivas de los geógrafos húngaros como pensadores integrados dentro de una comunidad epistémica, en la semiperiferia global; y (3) sus perspectivas sobre las conceptualizaciones etno-nacionalistas del espacio nacional. Al presentar una visión crítica de la historia de la geografía húngara del fin de siècle, nuestro estudio también abre la posibilidad para adelantar discusiones comparativas en lo que concierne a la colonialidad semiperiférica de otros casos, a grandes rasgos similares, y sobre la descolonización de las geografías semiperiféricas y sus pasados.

Key Words:

• Austro-Hungarian Empire
• Balkans
• decoloniality
• history of geography
• Hungary
• nesting colonialism
• semiperiphery

关键词:

• 奥匈帝国
• 巴尔干半岛
• 去殖民性质
• 地理学史
• 匈牙利
• 嵌套式殖民主义
• 半边缘国家

Palabras clave:

• Balcanes
• colonialismo anidado
• descolonialidad
• historia de la geografía
• Hungría
• Imperio Austrohúngaro
• semiperiferia

As in other European nations, geography in Hungary underwent rapid professionalization and institutionalization over the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Informed by transnational developments as well as by nationalism and nation building, Hungarian geography was deeply embedded within the European colonial-imperial project, and by the first decade of the twentieth century had begun shifting increasingly to a war mode as geographers began preparing for the “intellectual warfare” that ran parallel with the military efforts of combatant nations during World War I (Heffernan 2000; Seegel 2018; Górny 2019, 52). As a junior partner in the Austro-Hungarian Empire established in 1867, Hungary never did acquire overseas colonies. Hungarian geographers, however, were keen observers of (and in some cases direct participants in) the overseas colonial projects of other empires, and by the fin de siècle some of them became directly engaged as scholar-adventurers in Austria-Hungary’s short-lived colonial expansion in the Balkans.

Drawing inspiration from works that explore the “agency and creativity” of geographers from outside the Anglo-American “core” (Craggs and Neate 2019, 14; Ferretti 2020, 1163), our article examines the evolution of Hungarian geographical thinking on colonialism between 1870 and 1920, in particular as this overlapped with their own sense of coloniality on the global semiperiphery (Wallerstein 1979; Paiva and Roque de Oliveira 2021). What we offer here is by no means a definitive set of conclusions on these complex themes, but rather an invitation to further research and dialogue on a topic that, although it has long been overlooked by most historians of Hungarian geography, has in recent years become a focal point for scholars interested in the history and legacy of colonial entanglements in East Central Europe, and in the decolonizing of the field more generally (see, e.g., Ginelli 2018b; Ureña Valerio 2019).

Our study relies on a comprehensive analysis of articles that were published in Földrajzi Közlemények (Geographical Review), the journal of the Hungarian Geographical Society (HGS) and the dominant forum of academic geography in Hungary from its launch in 1873 to 1920, when the post–World War I Treaty of Trianon forced Hungary to surrender two thirds of its territory and abandon its imperial ambitions. We studied every contribution (including regular papers, annual reports, and book reviews) published by the leading figures of the HGS, and also examined articles and reports by other authors who wrote about the overseas colonial territories of other empires from the 1870s to the 1890s, when interest shifted noticeably toward the Balkans. In this light we also surveyed every article concerning the Balkans, a region that gradually became the subject of Hungarian territorial aspirations. This selection enabled us to gain a detailed overview of the geographical discourse on colonization in Hungary during the first fifty years after the institutionalization of Hungarian geography and revealed the complex and shifting dynamics of the discourse, the major views it articulated, and the leading figures who shaped it.

Decolonizing Geography: A Hungarian Perspective

Focusing on the history of geography in Hungary, a small country that has long belonged to the global semiperiphery, our article contributes to a rapidly growing body of scholarship on the decolonizing of geography in general (e.g., Radcliffe 2017, 2022; Ferretti 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022; Schelhaas et al. 2020), and also to an emergent body of scholarship on the spatializing and internationalizing of the history of geography in Hungary more specifically (e.g., Timár 2004; Győri and Gyuris 2013, 2015; Gyuris and Győri 2013; Bottlik and Kőszegi 2018; Ginelli 2018a; Gyuris 2018, 2020, 2022; Seegel 2018; Górny 2019; Győri and Withers 2019; Jobbitt and Győri 2020; Balogh 2021; Scott and Hajdú 2022). These Hungarian-centered studies have been especially inspired by the notions of the “historical geography of science” (Livingstone 1995), “geographies of science/scientific knowledge” (Livingstone 2003; Meusburger, Livingstone, and Jöns 2010; Mayhew and Withers 2020), “landscapes of knowledge” (Livingstone 2010), and “mobilities of knowledge” (Jöns, Meusburger, and Heffernan 2017), to name but a few.

Following Hodder, Legg, and Heffernan (2015) and Schelhaas et al. (2020), we recognize the need to rethink the international to interrogate “who could articulate the international and from where” (Hodder, Legg, and Heffernan 2015, 3). In line with Gregory’s (2004) well-known concept of the “colonial present,” we must be aware that “coloniality” (Quijano 2000; Mignolo and Walsh 2018)—that is, the “mindsets, knowledges, identities and structures of power” (Radcliffe 2022, 2) that emerged during the period of global colonization by European powers, along with the “colonial matrix of power” (Quijano 2000) inherent in them—has survived colonialism as a set of “longstanding patterns of power” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 243). This is true even in countries that were neither colonized nor made colonies, for their geographical communities have also been affected by global circuits of geographical knowledge production. As Esson et al. (2017) underscored, the decolonizing of geography is only possible by going beyond theoretical critiques and by questioning geography’s structures, practices, and institutions, which are strongly embedded in the social, economic, political, and ideological processes at a specific location. Therefore, decolonizing cannot proceed in the same way everywhere. Instead, it is “deeply situated” (Radcliffe 2022, ix), with everyone “carr[ying] out their own plural decolonizations from the spatiotemporal and geo-historical contexts in which they are situated” (Haesbert 2022, xvii).

The nonuniversal character of the decolonizing of geography also means it does not aim to replace a previously hegemonic coloniality-ridden narrative with another one, or the old “truth” with a new one in fundamentalist ways (Grosfoguel 2011). Instead, it promotes dialogue between diverse cultures rather than essentializing these cultures (Schelhaas et al. 2020) and strives for the replacing of exclusionary and singular modes of knowledge with a pluralistic view or a “pluriverse,” which provides space for a multitude of diverse views, and for “a world where many worlds fit” (Kothari et al. 2019, xxviii). We believe that a pluralizing of our view and an attentiveness to previously “subalternised and subaltern knowledge” (Schelhaas et al. 2020, vii) not only reflects an emancipatory moment that we consider valuable in itself, but also enriches global geography with “fundamental lessons that many central or Northern geographers … [have] ignored or despised for a long time” (Haesbert 2022, xiv).

Such a shift to a “pluriverse,” however, requires breaking out of “the coloniality of language” (Haesbert 2022, xv) and reconsidering sources from outside the global core of geographical knowledge production (cf. Mignolo and Escobar 2010)—or “diversifying voices and archives,” in Ferretti’s (2020, 1164) words. We agree with Schelhaas et al. (2020) and Ferretti (2022) that a proper analysis of these sources and integrating them into global geographical knowledge necessitates a “multilingual turn” (Ferretti 2022) and “effective multilingualism” (Schelhaas et al. 2020, ix); a project that in turn requires a solid proficiency of local languages as well as the globally dominant English, which is difficult to achieve and thus “constitute[s] a serious limitation to all the endeavours for effectively decolonizing geographical knowledge and practices” (Schelhaas et al. 2020, ix). The issue of language is not the only one here, for the decolonizing of geography and its pasts requires “rediscovering other geographical traditions” (Ferretti 2019), where a proper understanding of these traditions in their complex social, political, economic, and ideological embeddedness is possible if one has proficiency not only in the language, but also in the epistemologies of these traditions as well; that is, if one has “multi-epistemic literacy” (Radcliffe 2022, 216), which is hardly conceivable without employing interdisciplinary approaches (Ferretti 2021).

There is an especially serious bottleneck in the case of Hungary and sources written in Hungarian, for Hungarian is understood by few scholars outside of Hungary itself. Moreover, a contextualized understanding of Hungarian sources is hardly possible without a solid knowledge of competing intellectual and scientific traditions in early Hungarian geographical circles, as well as in German-speaking scientific communities, especially given the strong influence of those traditions on Hungarian geography from 1870 to the mid-twentieth century (Gyuris 2020). To cope with these challenges, our study is the joint multidisciplinary and international work of two native Hungarian geographers also proficient in English and German, one of them a trained historian as well, and a historian from Canada who has been doing research on the history of geography in Hungary for more than fifteen years and who is proficient in Hungarian. In this way we aim to meet the standards set by the Brazilian geographer Rogério Haesbert, namely that “every self-respecting decolonial study necessarily needs a greater involvement with multiple languages, in order to appreciate the worldviews and geographies of subalternized groups” (Haesbert 2022, xvi).

Decolonizing (from) the Global Semiperiphery

As a starting point for our analysis we agree with Haesbert (2022, xv) that “the colonization process … can never be dissociated from the expansive impetus of capitalist accumulation and consumption,” which consequently means that the concept of coloniality and, in our view, the project of decolonizing geography “can never be dissociated from a critical reading of the capitalist world system as a whole.” Haesbert’s explicit reference to the importance of the world capitalist system seems an appropriate place to stress that the cornerstone of Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis is a trichotomous understanding of the world in terms of core, semiperiphery, and periphery, one in which the semiperiphery is “a necessary structural element of the world-economy” (Wallerstein 1974, 349), with “distinctive” internal politics and social structures (Wallerstein 1979, 79). Hence, its integration into our analysis is critical, especially given that, as Clerc (2020) and Solarz (2014) stressed, most of the already available international scholarship is based on a dualistic understanding of North and South, and core and periphery. As Paiva and Roque de Oliveira (2021) highlighted in their article on the history of Luso-Brazilian geographies, and as Bennett (2014) argued in her book on global academic writing, such binaries are limiting, and cannot be applied unproblematically to geographical communities that are neither at the core of global knowledge production nor completely peripheralized.

It is true, though, that defining the semiperiphery is not a simple task, as Wallerstein “offer[ed] scant guidance on how to ‘operationalize’ world-system position or to precisely demarcate the boundaries of world-system zones” (Smith 2018, 5). Still, he provided two helpful concepts. First, he differentiated between “core-like” and “peripheral” products in the world economy and suggested judging the position of a country in the world system according to the relative share of both, defining the semiperiphery as constituted by countries with “a fairly even distribution” (Wallerstein 2004, 97); that is, a relatively equal mix of core and peripheral types of production (Chase-Dunn 1989, 77). Second, he defined “unequal exchange” as “a basic dynamic of global inequality underpinning historical world-system hierarchies” (Smith 2018, 5), where semiperipheral countries as intermediate actors “trade core-like products to peripheral zones and peripheral products to core zones” (Wallerstein 2004, 97). As subsequent sociological and international relations-informed literature on world systems analysis has underscored, the semiperiphery is a particularly volatile and dynamic zone due to the stresses resulting from this mixed position (Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000). The fact that many semiperipheral countries aspire to future hegemonic power (Smith 2018) plays a crucial role in supporting the exploitation of the periphery by the core (Elsenhans 2018). At the same time, however, the semiperiphery is also the locus of some of the most potent antisystemic movements (Chase-Dunn 2005), and thus serves simultaneously as a “launch pad” (Smith 2018, 15) for political challenges to the world system (Boatcă 2006).

In our view, Wallerstein’s economic production-centered concept can also be applied to knowledge production. In this respect, semiperipheral places in the global science landscape are those where both core-like (Northern and globally hegemonic) and peripheral (Southern and globally subalternized) kinds of knowledge are produced in significant volumes. In terms of the unequal exchange of knowledge, these places play an active role in mediating core-like knowledge to the periphery (and thus also contribute to the colonizing of peripheral geographies), while they channel subaltern voices from the periphery to ongoing scientific discourses at the core. Scholars on the semiperiphery in particular have therefore been forced to think “from both inside and outside the colonial-modern system” (Radcliffe 2022, 210), and in so doing have developed an ability for “border thinking” (Anzaldúa 1999).

As the Hungarian case demonstrates, the dynamics of geographic knowledge production and translation on the semiperiphery become even more complicated in the context of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century colonial and imperial projects in Europe when we take into consideration that the Hungarian political elite pursued their own imperial goals while simultaneously engaged in other larger imperial projects. In what follows, we explore the various and sometimes even contested ways that Hungarian geographers and geographical writers positioned themselves within the complex global-colonial matrix in general at the fin de siècle, and within Austria-Hungary’s colonial aspirations in the Balkans more specifically.

A View from the Margins: The Hungarian Framing of Overseas Colonization

Despite the aspirations for empire that came to define the decades leading up to World War I, Hungary did not join the race to acquire colonies in Africa and Asia, at least not directly. Constrained by its junior position within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and consumed by significant nation-building challenges on the multiethnic borderlands of its own kingdom, Hungarians were in no position to participate in overseas colonization, and certainly not on the scale of the great powers.

One of the organizations that shaped the Hungarian view on overseas colonization was the HGS. Founded in 1872, the HGS had a strong national character in contrast to the Imperial-Royal Geographical Society, which was established in Vienna in 1856. Although the founders of the Viennese society emphasized the supranational concept of the Habsburg Empire and was open to all scholars in the empire, it attracted only a few Hungarians (Mattes 2020, 189). The Hungarians regarded geography first and foremost as an important tool for Hungarian nation-building and avoided the Austrian learned society. The opportunity for establishing national geographical institutions came with the Ausgleich (or Compromise) that created the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy in 1867 and provided considerable autonomy for Hungarians over education and cultural policy. The decade following the Compromise saw the rise of geography in Hungary. In 1870, a department of geography was established at Royal Pest University (today Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest), and 250 people (including around fifty women) founded the HGS two years later. The Society always had a metropolitan dominance: 43 percent of the regular members of HGS and 69 percent of its Hungarian honorary members lived in Budapest at the turn of the century. Aside from the national society, no local or regional geographic organizations were established in Hungary, but regional branches of the HGS were established later (Győri and Gyuris forthcoming).

The leadership of the HGS considered it an important task to report on new geographical discoveries and overseas European colonial projects. Aware of the geopolitical and scientific implications of the imperial age in which they lived, they contented themselves by participating indirectly and often vicariously in the global imperial project. Their work was by no means insignificant or unimportant. For Hungarian geographers, such work was a prerequisite not only for “gaining admission to the circle of civilized nations,” but also for “winning the acknowledgement and appreciation” they felt they deserved within transnational scientific communities (Tanárky 1875, 291).

The HGS’s journal Földrajzi Közlemények (launched in 1873) published a number of short articles in Hungarian on overseas European colonies as early as the 1870s, studies that were at first compiled from the translated texts of German as well as French and British authors. The state of geographic knowledge production in Hungary in this early period reflected the international power relations in contemporary academic networks at the time, and underscored the especially strong links between Hungarian academia and the leading centers of Germanophone science and geography (Gyuris 2020). For the most part, the Hungarian articles preserved not just the content, but also the overtly racist tones of the original text. Popularizing geographies of empire (Butlin 2009) and presenting the colonial project as a “civilizing mission” (Conklin 1997), these articles were typically published without any critical comment. A prime example of this was the report in Földrajzi Közlemények of the opening speech of the Brussels Geographical Conference in 1876. As the journal reported, Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909) described the colonization of central Africa as “the worthy crusade of our progressive century” (HGS 1876, 284), one that would “open up for culture the only part of the globe which it has not yet reached, to dispel the darkness covering all peoples of it” (HGS 1876, 284). In the absence of critical commentary, texts such as this failed to provide any information about the colonizers’ brutality in the Belgian Congo and other European overseas colonies.

Increasingly, however, some of the Hungarian authors began to produce critical articles of their own. These included the annual reports of the president and the general secretary of HGS, along with texts written by members of the society based often on the readings they were doing rather than actual studies in the field. These authors all realized the close attention that geographers in the West were paying to colonial issues, and took note of the imperial, racist, and supremacist tone permeating the international geographical discourse of the time. HGS president János Hunfalvy (1820–1888) was particularly critical of colonialism precisely because of the violent racist attitudes it embodied. A report published by Hunfalvy in Földrajzi Közlemények on the International Geographical Congress held in Paris in 1875 provides a clear record of this recognition. In one of the sections, he reported that “the majority view was that … humans of European origin were destined for leading and supervising work. … Some have strongly condemned the abolition of slavery, for the black man cannot live with freedom, and have argued that slavery should be sustained precisely in the black man’s own interest” (Hunfalvy 1875, 260). Although Hunfalvy admittedly shared some of the general enthusiasm for the colonial/imperial project and wrote positively about the global spread of European culture and infrastructure (e.g., hospitals and schools), he sharply criticized the brutal side of colonization.

As the head of the first geography department in Hungary and the president of HGS, Hunfalvy was the leading figure of Hungarian geography from 1870 until his death in 1888. Hunfalvy, who studied not only in Hungary but at the universities of Berlin and Tübingen, and who was a devotee of Ritter’s geographical approach, participated regularly in international geographical (and statistical) congresses. His exposure to different epistemic communities, his personal international networks, and his academic self-confidence stemming from a solid understanding of the main trends in contemporary international geography made him aware that international geography was not univocal and that colonial projects were far from being praised by all geographers (Gyuris 2020). He strongly opposed racist and environmentalist arguments that were mobilized by colonizers to explain the purported backwardness of the colonies, and rejected any claim that dismissed the subjugation of Indigenous people as either a historically necessary or justified act. As he put it in his strongly worded speech at the opening of the 1875–1876 academic year at the University of Budapest:

An ever-expanding school has emerged recently, which denies the existence of intellectual and moral order in the life of humankind, and publicizes the exclusive legitimacy and omnipotence of the material and mechanistic force of nature. For believers of this school the Spanish conquerors, who wiped out the mild ancient population of the West Indies with blood hounds [sic], and the English planters, who eradicated the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania, New Holland [Australia] and North America, just followed and are following the eternal laws of nature. … We cannot accept the fundaments of this pseudo-reasoning and must protest against its false conclusions. (Hunfalvy 1876, 75)

Hunfalvy’s view of geographical determinism and the dark side of colonization was inseparable from his identity as a proud Hungarian. Although he was born as Hunsdorfer in the German-speaking Zipser community in the northern part of pre-1920 Hungary and only learned the Hungarian language as a teenager (Márki 1889), he actively took part on the Hungarian side in the failed Hungarian War of Independence against Austria and the Habsburgs in 1848–1849, for which he was imprisoned and forced to give up his job as a college professor (Fodor 2006). This setback did not deter him from remaining an enthusiastic supporter and, later on, becoming a prominent representative of Hungarian science, both as a university chair and HGS president soon after the Compromise. Given his past experiences and personal trajectory, Hunfalvy was well aware that Hungarians themselves were despised by Western European colonizers for the same reasons that the Indigenous peoples of overseas colonies were (Hunfalvy 1876). Hunfalvy was particularly critical of advocates of geographical determinism who, as proponents of a “new and overarching worldview,” insisted that “small and weak nations have no right to exist and can make no demand for survival.” Noting that “the apostles of this worldview even name the nations which have no other destiny but to perish,” Hunfalvy reminded his readers that “they count us [Hungarians] among the stigmatized nations that have been sentenced to death” (Hunfalvy 1876, 76).

Although a prominent geographer, Hunfalvy did not represent the views of everyone in the field. There was, in fact, a significant divide and plurality of voices within Hungary’s emergent geographical community regarding the aims, practices, and relative merits of colonialization, at least until the late nineteenth century when Hungary and many Hungarian geographers began to engage more directly in the colonial project in the Balkans. The internationally renowned traveler, linguist, and orientalist Ármin Vámbéry (1832–1913), for example, who was a founding member of HGS before becoming its vice president and president (1889–1890), internalized Western European colonial views, especially those from Britain. His works on colonialism were tainted by an aggressively racist and imperial mode of speech, and he regarded many Indigenous peoples in European colonies as biologically inferior. For example, he argued that “Central Africa belongs to the most poorly inhabited places on Earth not because of its climatic adverseness, but because of the laziness and corruption that blacks have in their blood [sic]” (Vámbéry 1883, 10). In his view, only Europeans were capable of elevating non-European races to a higher civilizational level, and he praised especially the British colonial project in this regard. To justify his opinion, he provided a remarkably one-sided narrative of British colonization in India, arguing that “under the protection of Great Britain’s humane and noble cultural endeavors, the wellbeing of the Hindi people had increased to a level that had previously been unimaginable” (Vámbéry 1883, 12).

Vámbéry’s apparent lack of solidarity with oppressed Indigenous peoples in overseas colonies might seem especially striking in light of the fact that he himself had numerous bitter experiences of being “othered” by many of his contemporaries from his childhood until much later in his career. Although talented as a scholar, he suffered for decades from racist, ableist, classist, and religious marginalization as the descendent of a poor Jewish family who lost his father at the age of one and who grew up with a paralyzed left leg (Fodor 2006). Although he would make a name for himself in London (in part because of his collaboration with British intelligence, but also because he was proficient in more than twenty languages and was celebrated for his journeys to vast regions in Central Asia between 1861 and 1864), Vámbéry’s achievements remained largely unacknowledged in Hungary, except among a handful of scholars who admired him. The fact that he had become a celebrity in Britain attracted the attention of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph II, however, who personally appointed Vámbéry to a professorship at the University of Pest. Despite the emperor’s support, the leadership of the predominantly Roman Catholic university was not fond of Vámbéry, a convert to Calvinism and autodidact who lacked the distinguished academic pedigree of his fellow professors (Rac 2014; Ablonczy 2022). Admired by the British but marginalized at home until much later in his career, Vámbéry internalized and promoted the British imperial attitude toward colonies and colonized peoples. Closely networked with Britain’s academic elite, Vámbéry was a strong supporter of colonialism as a Western European mission, and was one of its chief proponents and sympathizers in Hungary (Mandler 2016).

Unlike Vámbéry and Hunfalvy, other authors who published in Földrajzi Közlemények in the 1870s and 1880s did not form such definite or strong opinions on the colonial project. Instead, they constituted a group of hesitant geographers who were neither clearly pro- nor anticolonial but rather “semiperipheral” in that they wavered over the contradictions embedded in what Quijano (2000) and Mignolo (2007) called the inseparability of modernity and coloniality as modernity’s “dark side” (Mignolo 2000), and what philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis identified as a constant dispute between modernity’s autonomous-liberatory and domination-centric projects (Radcliffe 2022). Although these hesitant semiperipheral geographers referred to the Indigenous peoples of Australia, Southeast Asia, and Africa as culturally “primitive” and “barbarian,” and although they stressed that many Western travelers and scientists did not even consider them “worthy of being called humans” (Laky 1876, 98), they also frequently referred to their “natural talent.” Insisting that this same group of people was neither biologically “inferior” nor particularly responsible for their own situation, this group of Hungarian geographers identified the geographical isolation of these peoples (especially in terms of their limited opportunities for communication with others) as well as their “rough treatment” (Laky 1876, 99) at the hands of other peoples as an explanation for their relative backwardness. The latter included both oppressive Asian elites and their “Asian and medieval ideas” (Zichy 1877, 179) as well as the European colonizers “running wild morally in Australia” (Laky 1876, 101), and European missionaries in Africa, “many of whom are complete tyrants over aboriginals” (György 1883, 97).

In some ways anticipating the critique of what postcolonial critic Gayati Spivak would much later refer to as the “sanctioned ignorance” (Spivak 1999) of many scholars trained in the “Western” tradition and the “epistemic violence” (Spivak 1988) they perpetrated against Indigenous knowledges, several of Hungary’s hesitant geographers noted that the many virtues of Indigenous people—including their intelligence, rich legends, sense of honor, and even precolonial material cultures—had been either overlooked or openly denigrated by Europeans. Such was the case in Australia, for example, where the Indigenous people “easily and quickly learn any language” and “handle their weapons and tools skillfully” (Laky 1876, 99), or in central Africa, where they “already had real cities before the arrival of Europeans” (György 1883, 96). Some authors even incorporated emotional considerations into their analyses (something that was often missing from the civilization-centered colonial discourse) pointing out, for instance, that the Indigenous people would be happier if they could resist adopting the European way of life (Kompolthy 1879). In the end, most commentators agreed with the sentiments of traveler and geographer Ágost Zichy (1877), who in his observation of Dutch colonial rule in the East Indies concluded that, though it resulted in “a true boon” for those who were subjected to it, colonial rule itself could “only be accepted as temporary and resulting from extraordinary circumstances” (188).

Some authors went beyond critical assessments of European overseas colonization and commented on the messiness of colonial knowledge production itself, complaining, for instance, that “the data of the missionaries are so contrary to each other that they cannot be figured out” (Laky 1876, 99–100). In a few cases, they also expressed overt criticism of the narrow-minded Eurocentric approach of Western colonizers. As a review of a German book on the Ottoman Empire published anonymously in Földrajzi Közlemények put it, “there is huge ignorance in the West about the East,” primarily because Western European analyses of the East were grounded in preconceived and uncritical assumptions about the East itself. As the unnamed reviewer wrote, Western scholars and observers “regard their own standpoint as infallible and righteous, and they are ready to condemn everything that does not adapt to their way of thinking” (HGS 1877, 281).

It is worth noting that the hesitant geographers in Hungary in the 1870s and 1880s were mainly interested nobles, secondary school teachers, and other representatives of the intelligentsia (e.g., journalists), commentators whose views reflected the educated public discourse in Hungary more than they did the emerging specialized discourses of international academic geography (which, unlike Hunfalvy and Vámbéry, they had little power to shape). Although the authors held the civilizational capacities of Western colonial powers in high regard, they also alluded to the parallels they saw between the subordination of Indigenous people in the European colonies and the oppression of Hungarians in the Austrian Empire before 1867. Given that “shared experiences matter in the construction of solidarity” (Kelliher 2018, 5), such historical parallels led many Hungarian authors to sympathize with Indigenous peoples in the colonies, even if they persisted in considering them “less civilized.”

In sum, overseas European colonization became a topical issue in Hungarian geography by the fin de siècle, despite the fact that Hungary itself did not possess colonies. Hungarian geographers had different and even conflicting views about colonization, ones that often corresponded to their variegated biographical trajectories. Yet, the last fifteen to twenty years of the nineteenth century brought about new trends. With Hungary becoming more powerful economically and politically within the Austro-Hungarian Empire after 1867, many of Hungary’s political and cultural elite, including several geographers, began dreaming quite seriously about their country’s possible expansion into the Balkans, appropriating and deploying Western imperialist arguments and vocabularies as they did so.

Agents of Empire: Hungarian Geographers and the Colonial Project in the Balkans

In October 1908, with the Ottoman leadership reeling from the Young Turk rebellion and the Russian Empire suffering a temporary crisis of confidence after its defeat to Japan only three years earlier, the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. Having jointly administered the provinces with the waning Ottoman Empire since the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the annexation marked a new if short-lived chapter in Austria-Hungary’s colonial-imperial project. Leading voices within the empire insisted that the securing of Austro-Hungarian control over the western part of the Balkans was important for several reasons, not least of which was to gain a stronger foothold in the region to defend Habsburg interests against the geopolitical agenda of the Russian Empire and the expansionist desires of Serbia and other Balkan states, and also to establish new markets for the benefit of the empire’s industrial exports (Csaplár-Degovics 2022). For Hungarian geographers, the opening of the Balkan frontier in Bosnia-Herzegovina provided a meaningful opportunity to both imagine and partake in a colonial project that extended beyond their own borders. Although in many ways different from the overseas colonial projects of Europe’s other empires, the “proximal colonialism” (Palavestra 2014) of the Austro-Hungarian Empire nevertheless forged a concrete space within which hitherto vicarious and often hesitant colonial fantasies could be realized, and Hungarian geographers could at last transform themselves into the confident protagonists of their own imperial narratives.

The decade between 1908 and the end of World War I has traditionally been regarded as a triumphant—even “heroic”—period for Hungarian geography, with scientists cast as adventurers and scholars mobilized on the frontlines of a global competition for territory and geopolitical influence (Jobbitt 2015). As junior partners in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungarian geographers were well aware of the stakes of the great colonial game at the fin de siècle, especially in the Balkans, where Hungarian interests often collided with the aspirations of the region’s nationalist movements, and where they also came into sharp conflict with Austrian goals for the shared empire (Donia 2014, 2015). Although most Hungarian geographers had been trained in the German, Austrian, and Swiss tradition (Gyuris 2020), and thus shared many of the same scientific ideas, their unique experiences—and perhaps more important their perceptions—as Hungarians shaped their attitudes toward the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the colonial project more generally. Memories of Austrian oppression and the violent suppression of the Hungarian War of Independence in 1849 were still vivid in the second half of the nineteenth century, and although imperial structures and institutions might have provided opportunities for professional development and upward mobility (Deák 1990; Judson 2016), Hungarian geography developed along an independent, if parallel, path. This is not to say, however, that the authors of articles published in Földrajzi Közlemények and other leading Hungarian journals disagreed with the broad territorial goals of Austro-Hungarian foreign policy. Far from it. In fact, Hungarian geographers were strong supporters of the Empire’s growing influence in the Balkans. There was no significant overlap, though, between the membership of the Austrian and Hungarian geographical societies, and Hungarian geographers insisted not only that Hungary’s goals in the region were different from Austrian ones, but also that their approach to colonialism itself differed greatly from that of their Austrian counterparts (Győri and Gyuris forthcoming).

For Hungarian geographers, Hungary’s mission in the Balkans was very much a colonial project within a colonial project, a “nesting colonialism” (Petrović 2010) not unlike the “nesting orientalism” that Bakić-Hayden (1995) identified as a key feature of identity formation and ethno-nationalist projects in the Balkans since the late nineteenth century. Shaped as much by an acute awareness of their own relative backwardness as they were by the Eurocentric notions of civilizational superiority that they shared with their colleagues in Vienna and the rest of Europe, a number of Hungarian scholars began thinking of the Balkans as “our own orient” (Strausz 1885, 264; Hajdú 2007), a foreign yet partially familiar space that they themselves were best suited to discover, map, and administer given their historical, cultural, and geographical proximity to the region and its peoples. Although well aware of their marginal position within the Habsburg Empire in particular and the colonial competition more generally, a number of Hungarian geographers nevertheless shared the dreams and echoed the pronouncements of public figures who were confident that Hungary would carve out a space for the nation on the peninsula, either within the existing framework of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or outside it (see, e.g., Cholnoky 1915; Fodor 1917). Although few likely shared the grandiose fantasies of radical figures like the nationalist politician and journalist Pál Hoitsy (1850–1927), who wrote in 1902 that future generations of Hungarians were destined to dominate southeastern Europe so completely that they would “live to see Hungarian supremacy over Bulgaria, and hear Hungarian spoken on the streets of Sofia” (Janos 1982, 139–40), most viewed the Hungarian colonial project in the Balkans as necessary, and even natural.

Prompted by competition both within and outside the Empire, and buoyed by fin de siècle optimism and confidence, the Hungarian government and other stakeholders within Hungary established numerous research institutes and societies to address the need for accurate information on the Balkans (Hajdú 2007). With the support of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungarian travelers and scientists, including geographers, started to explore the peninsula with an intensity and attention to detail that would have been familiar in any other colonial-imperial context of the time. Balkan field work continued even during World War I, and was accelerated and facilitated by the fact that the military occupation of a significant part of the region by the Austro-Hungarian army opened up new research areas (Fodor 2006; Jobbitt 2015). Although the institutes were new and the expeditions became both more frequent and better funded, the paternalistic attitudes that fin de siècle Hungarian geographers expressed toward the region and its people were not at all novel, and in fact can be found in even the earliest articles, reviews, and reports published in Földrajzi Közlemények.

In 1874, for example, Henrik Morgenstern, an extraordinarily talented student of Jewish origin at the University of Budapest who later Hungarianized his name as Marczali and became a renowned professor of history, published a sophisticated assessment of Hungary’s role as a “link between east and west, civilization and barbarism, Europe and Asia” (Morgenstern 1874, 348). Morgenstern’s forty-eight-page essay, undeniably one of the most sophisticated studies in the early volumes of Földrajzi Közlemények and permeated with the teleological understanding of geography in the style of Carl Ritter, argued that the very geography of Hungary, situated at the heart of the Danubian basin, dictated the nation’s civilizational mission. Nourished by the Danube and connected by its tributaries to the Balkans, Hungary was well poised to spread the so-called blessings of civilization to its backward and less fortunate neighbors. Hungarians, Morgenstern argued, should accept the “sublime vocation” that geography had bestowed upon them. The Danube, he insisted, would guarantee Hungary’s future prosperity, while the “honest work” of its people would render Hungarians “worthy of their place in the center of Europe” (Morgenstern 1874, 363–64). Pointing in particular to the Balkans, he added that it would be “natural” for Hungarians to act as go-betweens, and to transfer the “cultural treasures” they had acquired from the west “to their more uneducated neighbors” in the south (Morgenstern 1874, 367). Although they tended to stress the less civilized nature of the Balkans and its peoples, societies, and environments, Hungarian commentators were nevertheless careful to point out that low civilizational levels and lack of visible progress were not necessarily the fault of the people themselves, but could instead be traced to the poor leadership of uneducated and easily corrupted local elites (Erődi 1874; Király 1875; see also Erődi 1876b on Montenegro), or to the negligence of their Ottoman rulers (Erődi 1876a on Albania).

By the turn of the century, the attitudes of Hungarian geographers began to shift, at least with regard to the external reasons for Balkan underdevelopment and perceived backwardness. Writing in 1898 on the question of Dalmatia, Rezső Havass (1852–1927) claimed unequivocally that the former Venetian province (which the Habsburg Empire acquired at the Congress of Vienna in 1815) should be annexed to the Hungarian part of the joint empire. In his view, Hungarians had better knowledge of the region and closer historical ties, and for this reason were better suited to the task than either the indifferent Austrians, who Havass criticized for the “decay” and “decline” that he saw when touring Dalmatia, or the local Slavic and Slavicized Italian elite, “who had become lazy under the influence of oriental customs” (Havass 1898, 57). Hungarians, by contrast, were “cleverer, smarter, and more vital” than the local elite, and more responsible as administrators and stewards of nature than the negligent and ignorant Austrian colonizers. Even the Dalmatians, he claimed, had begun to clamor for Hungarian leadership, and for their own annexation to Hungary. Only in this way could Dalmatia be expected “to flourish” (Havass 1898, 73).

A founding member of the HGS and one of Hunfalvy’s “first disciples” (Fodor 2006, 605), Havass was regarded by his contemporaries as “the enthusiastic and determined champion of Hungarian imperialism” (Hajdú 2007, 15). Havass served as Vice President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for nearly two decades (1897–1914) and, as one of the most prolific writers on the Balkans among Hungarian geographers, was a strong advocate for the advancement of Hungary’s political and economic interests on the peninsula (Havass 1912, 1913; Gyuris 2019). He was also a vocal opponent of the proposed trialist reorganization of the dualist empire, a move that, if adopted, would have brought about the creation of a new South Slav state equal to Austria and Hungary within the empire. Trialism, he claimed, was an idea hatched in Vienna, and not one conceived of by the South Slavs. Accusing the Austrians of wanting to block Hungarian access to the sea, Havass argued that the end goal of the trialist proposal was to undermine and weaken Hungary. The idea, he added, was also foolish from a political point of view, as there was “no national unity” among the South Slavs, and no hope that the “Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, and Bosnians will ever merge into one body” (Havass 1907, 382). Perhaps more important for Havass, trialism was nonsense from a geographical point of view, as the southern territories of the Empire “belong[ed] to Hungary geographically” (384).

To further his argument, Havass published a “Constitutional Map of the Hungarian Empire” in 1909 (Figure 1). The legend for the map made clear that the imagined Hungarian Empire consisted of the Kingdom of Hungary, Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the City of Fiume (Rijeka). Havass’s idea was that, above all else, the 1:1 million map (84 × 105 cm) would serve the public interest. As an advertisement published in Földrajzi Közlemények (Figure 2) would later stress, “in light of the annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina, and in contrast to [Vienna’s] trialist aspirations, the purpose of this map is to show the indisputable parts of the Hungarian Empire, based on our existing laws.” The map, the advertisement added, illustrated a reality of “permanent importance” to Hungarians and thus “should be hung in the office of every Hungarian politician, in every school next to the coat of arms of the country, and in every town hall” (Anonymous 1912).

Figure 1. Rezső Havass (1909): A Magyar Birodalom közjogi térképe [Constitutional map of the Hungarian Empire]. Budapest, Hungary: Magyar Földrajzi Intézet Rt. [Hungarian Geographical Institute Plc]. Reprinted with the permission of the Military History Institute and Museum of the Hungarian Ministry of Defense.

Figure 2. Anonymous (1912): A Magyar Birodalom közjogi térképe [Constitutional map of the Hungarian Empire]. Advertisement in the Földrajzi Közlemények 40:184. Reprinted with the permission of the Hungarian Geographical Society.

Attitudes like Havass’s proliferated into World War I. Although leading Hungarian politicians all supported Prime Minister István Tisza’s (1913–1917) opposition to the declaration of war on Serbia in 1914 and shared his concerns that the potential annexation of additional territory in the Balkans would be undesirable as it would further tip the ethnographic balance in the empire in favor of the Slavs (Bertényi 2005, 81), there were many public figures in Hungary, prominent geographers among them, who argued for the enlargement of imperial territory during the war (Gyuris 2019). Cholnoky, who referred to the Balkans on the eve of war as a space Hungary could make use of “as a colony” (Cholnoky 1912, 4), was a keen supporter of territorial expansion to the south. Economic geographer and statistician Kemény, in turn, declared midwar that it was the task of Hungary and its allies to bring the “torch of culture” to the inhabitants of Greater Serbia (Kemény 1916, 107), a region that many still considered to be among the “most unknown” areas in Europe (Hunfalvy 1874; Erődi 1875; Lóczy 1920, 83). During the war itself, geographical field work in the Balkans was accelerated and facilitated by an increased military presence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and by the fact that the military occupation of a significant part of Serbia by the Austro-Hungarian army opened up new research areas. As geographer Ferenc Fodor (1887–1962) noted at the beginning of a geobotanical survey of Bosnia in 1917, “the very conditions of the war have made it easier to undertake our research since virtually the entire Balkans are under our military control” (Fodor 1917, 1). As a member of a small team sponsored by the Hungarian Academy of Science’s Oriental Committee and sent to Bosnia to conduct a geobotanical survey during the last years of the war, Fodor proved to be a keen observer of more than just the plants he collected and analyzed (Figure 3). His field diaries suggest clearly how understandings of race intersected with perceptions of colonial space, and further how Hungarian coloniality on the semiperiphery could be negotiated, and even overcome, against the backdrop of the less civilized people and spaces they encountered and imagined. Whereas Fodor cast himself as a conquering Caesar (“With my first steps I walked upon Balkan soil just as Caesar once did in Egypt”; Fodor 1917, 4; see also Jobbitt 2015, 2), the Muslim men of Bosnia he encountered were at best “half-Europeanized” (Fodor 1917, 18), and not fully capable of overcoming their oriental character or developing their homeland on their own.

Figure 3. The Hungarian geographer Ferenc Fodor (in the left with a cane) and Hungarian scientists on a research expedition in Bosnia, 1917. From Ferenc Fodor’s family collection, with the kind permission of Klára Kollárné Hunek, granddaughter of Ferenc Fodor.

Imperial views about the Balkans persisted in Hungary even after immanent defeat in World War I became obvious. In 1918, the HGS published a lengthy manifesto in Földrajzi Közlemények that provided a careful outline of all the geographical arguments that could be mobilized during peace negotiations to justify greater Hungary’s continued existence after the war (HGS 1918). Beyond arguments rooted in physical and human geography, the manifesto also underscored Hungary’s cultural advantages, stressing the nation’s regenerative capacity as a civilizing force in the region, especially for the peoples on the eastern and southern peripheries of the country. Making skillful—if creative—use of the work of the U.S. geographer Mark Jefferson (1911) on “The Culture of the Nations,” the manifesto suggested that Hungary, as a nation on the southeastern edge of civilized Europe, was uniquely poised to mediate European culture to the less civilized peoples of the region.

As these examples illustrate, the war brought about a further hardening of geographical thinking around questions of colonialism as Hungarian geographers advocated more uniformly, and more aggressively, for their nation’s involvement in the colonial-imperial project in the Balkans. Whereas the attitudes of Hungarian geographers had been simultaneously more critical of colonialism and more sympathetic about the fate of the colonized in the 1870s and 1880s, the intensification of colonialism at the turn of the century, and the subsequent outbreak of conflict in 1914, contributed directly to the intensification of racialized discourses of the colonial other and the spaces they inhabited. So long as colonization had remained the distant overseas project of other nations, debate around the question of colonialism had been more wide-ranging, speculative, and heterogenous. Once the colonial question became geopolitically relevant to Hungarian state-building within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian empire and its Balkan aspirations, though, there was much less room for dissenting voices as geographers committed themselves and their science to the service of the nation.

Conclusion: Geographical Thinking at Europe’s “Semicore”

Offering critical insight into the production and translation of geographical knowledge in Hungary at the fin de siècle, our study contributes to a growing body of scholarship that, in its call for the decolonization of geography and its pasts, has made increasing room for the close examination of a wide range of colonialities that go beyond the mainly Anglophone and Latin American cases that have dominated the literature so far. As our study reveals, both geography and geographers were embedded in a complex and evolving political and intellectual process, one that was informed and shaped by Hungary’s semiperipheral status and had a profound impact on the development of geography as a set of ideas and disciplinary practices. Although advocates of colonialism in Hungary argued that Hungarian experiences as a nation “in-between” would render them more benevolent colonizers, there were some prominent Hungarian thinkers who rejected this claim outright (at least in the case of overseas colonization), and many others who remained ambiguous and otherwise hesitant toward the colonial project. The hesitant attitude among many Hungarian geographers shifted significantly at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, when the Austro-Hungarian empire began pursuing its imperial goals in the Balkans more aggressively, especially after the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. As a “proximate colony” (Donia 2014, 2015), Bosnia-Herzegovina not only became the locus of intense intraempire competition between political and industrial elites in Hungary and Austria for “domination of the Bosnian market” (Donia 2014, 197), but also served as a concrete space for the projection of colonial-imperial fantasies on the part of Hungarian geographers to the end of World War I.

As imperial aspirations for expanding Hungary’s sphere of influence into the Balkans intensified, many Hungarian geographers chose to situate Hungary at what might usefully be called Europe’s semicore, rather than its semiperiphery. Cognizant that they lagged behind their Western European competitors economically, and concerned about their nation’s inferior status within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, geographers nevertheless embraced Hungary’s liminal status as a strength, rather than a weakness, especially in moral terms. This affirmative understanding of the nation’s position as a civilizational intermediary became increasingly common by the turn of the century as public figures in Hungary explored and promoted Hungary’s colonial opportunities in the Balkans. Similar to the discourses circulating in the Lusophone world (Paiva and Roque de Oliveira 2021) that cast Portuguese colonialism as uniquely benign in comparison to British and French colonialism (a perception that Brazilian sociologist Freyre would later define as lusotropicalism; Castelo 1999; Anderson, Roque, and Santos 2019), Hungary’s colonial advocates effectively promised colonialism with a human face—or a form of “humanitarian imperialism” as Demeter and Csaplár-Degovics (2018, 4) put it. Hungarians, they argued, were in possession not only of the civilizational vitality required for colonization, but also the cultural sensitivity and understanding that would result in harmonious relations between colonizer and colonized, and a peaceful and profitable transition from (semi)barbarism to civilization (Csaplár-Degovics 2022). Although quite adept at subverting Eurocentric civilizational hierarchies in their efforts to justify their own colonial stance, leading Hungarian geographers generally did so without directly challenging the colonial discourses that privileged West over East, North over South, and Whiteness over everything else (on this general dynamic in Hungary at the fin de siècle, see Rac 2014). What most Hungarian geographers aimed for, in other words, was not a full “reversal of the colonial gaze” (Ferretti 2020, 1162), but rather a refraction of it through a semiperipheral lens.

An analysis of the Hungarian story does more than merely fill a gap in the history of geography, however. Situated on the global semiperiphery, the Hungarian case helps us in the first place to conceptualize semiperipherality in the world system of knowledge production in ways that go beyond, and thus could be useful to, discussions in sociology and international relations that look primarily at semiperipherality in terms of economic production. More particularly, our analysis helps to identify and sketch out what Smith (2018, 14) called “fruitful avenues of research” that complicate dualistic world systems models grounded in “core and periphery” binaries, and beyond this compels us to think in more complex terms about the nature of empire and colonialism as quintessentially “European” fin de siècle endeavors. By showing how countries like Hungary occupy a more complex position in the global history of colonization and coloniality than most scholars have considered, our study reinforces the idea that Europe is not “a homogenous power-house exerting dominance elsewhere in the world” (Radcliffe 2022, 22), and points to the need for more nuanced debates on decolonization (see also de Sousa Santos 2017).

Although more work needs to be done on the question of Hungary’s semiperipheral status, and although scholars will no doubt continue to debate the notion of the global semiperiphery and which countries or regions belong to it (cf. Smith 2018), we are confident that our study opens up the possibility for comparative research not just on semiperipheral geographies in general (from Latin America to East Asia), but also on the semiperipheral coloniality of other broadly similar nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cases, such as Scotland, Wales, and Ireland within Great Britain, the British Dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, or Finland within the Russian Empire. Such a comparative approach would help bring a number of otherwise disconnected epistemic communities into direct conversation with each other, thus further clarifying, and no doubt complicating, the story of geographical knowledge production on the global semiperiphery.

As a growing number of scholars have shown, critical examinations of colonial mindsets and the discourse and practices that have constructed and perpetuated them historically are of paramount importance to academe and to politics and the public more generally, not only because this history has remained marginalized and systematically silenced until very recently, but also because colonial institutions and attitudes from the past continue to shape and inform institutions and attitudes in the present. As Maldonado-Torres (2007) stated: “coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self” (243). In this light, scholars (and we include ourselves in this) must do more than merely acknowledge the role geography has played historically in colonialism. We must also “confront the colonial present,” and in so doing address not only the “active nature of geographical knowledge in sustaining colonial relations” (Holmes, Hunt, and Piedalue 2014, 541), but also the “patriarchal, colonial, and imperial legacies [that] continue to inform the discipline of geography” (McKittrick 2019, 244). This is as applicable to the Hungarian case as it is to any other case in need of decolonization. In Hungary, the history of Hungarian geography between 1870 and 1920 in particular is still discussed uncritically in some circles as a “heroic” era, with problematic civilizational discourses of conquest that are papered over and otherwise ignored by accounts that celebrate geographers as patriotic scholars and noble adventurers who contributed to a veritable golden age in Hungarian history. Although focused on the decolonization of the past, our study therefore also has an eye to the decolonizing of geography in the present, a task that is of critical importance, and that is being pursued with an understandable sense of urgency by many of our colleagues worldwide.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the reviewers and editors for their helpful feedback on this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Research in this article was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the National Research, Development, and Innovation Office of Hungary (NKFIH) within the project “Geographical Perspectives of the Trianon Peace Treaty” (K 125001).

Notes on contributors

Ferenc Gyuris

FERENC GYURIS is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Economic Geography, Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, H 1117. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include the history of Hungarian geography and the quantitative revolution in geography, the decolonizing of geography, and geographies of knowledge.

Steven Jobbitt

STEVEN JOBBITT is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON P7B 5E1, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include the history of Hungarian geography and watershed management, and the formation of right-wing identities and subjectivities.

Róbert Győri

RÓBERT GYŐRI is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Economic Geography, Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, H 1117. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include historical geography, the history of Hungarian geography and the Trianon peace treaty, and the history of Hungarian geography during state socialism.