This volume investigates the history of the parliamentary assemblies of Sweden, Poland and Hungary in the final period of the ancien régime, offering an analysis of these three representative assemblies in a systematic comparative framework for the first time.
The book studies the Polish sejm, the Swedish riksdag and the Hungarian diaeta, focusing on the eighteenth century with retrospective consideration of developments in the previous century and a forward-looking gaze at the events of the following era. While Volume I of this series mapped the institutional framework and focused on the MPs’ motivation, this book concentrates on the forms and practices that characterized these three representative institutions, with special attention paid to the questions of free mandate and majority voting. The freedom of mandates and the emergence of majority voting are explored in comparative studies (England and Poland) or parallel chapters (Sweden and Hungary), and the most important prerogative of these representative assemblies, a control on extraordinary taxes, is explored in parallel for Sweden and Hungary.
Intended for specialist readers, postgraduate students and scholars, this research will be of particular interest to those studying early modern European history and political history.
Introduction: ‘The sweet fruits of liberty’ 1. The Variety of Political Systems in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Conditions, Institutions, Interests Part 1: Finances and representation 2. The Political Economy of Taxation: Bargaining at the Meetings of the Swedish riksdag, 1789–1812 3. Contributions, subsidies, and the estates of Hungary, 1790–1812 4. The Representation of the Byzantine Rite Clergy at the Hungarian Diet 5. Princeps inter pares: Karol Stanisław Radziwiłł’s Electoral Machine and the Polish-Lithuanian Parliament in the Late Eighteenth Century Part 2: Mandates and voting 6. From Delegation to Representation: Polish-Lithuanian Parliamentary Reform and the British Example 7. The Struggle for the Majority Rule in the Polish-Lithuanian sejm of the eighteenth century 8. Making parliamentary rule work: The introduction of the free mandate and majority voting in the Swedish riksdag (1719–1723) 9. Forms of Modern Parliamentarism in Eighteenth-Century Hungary 10. ‘Instructiones ablegatum’: Parliamentary Decisions, Members of Parliament, and their Constituencies in Hungary in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
István M. Szijártó is a professor of history at Eötvös University, Hungary. His research interests include microhistory and the history of Hungarian parliamentarism. His books in English are What is microhistory? Theory and practice (2013, with Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon) and Estates and constitution. The parliament in eighteenth-century Hungary (2020). Wim Blockmans is a professor emeritus of history at Leiden University, Netherlands. His research aims to understand the variation of representative institutions throughout Europe. In 2024, he published The Voice of the People? Political Participation before the Revolutions. László Kontler is a professor of history at Central European University, Hungary/Austria. His research and publications focus on intellectual history, history of political thought, translation and reception, and the production and circulation of knowledge in early modern Europe. His books include Translations, Histories, Enlightenments: William Robertson in Germany, 1760–1795 (2014) and Maximilian Hell (1720–1792) and the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe (2020, with Per Pippin Aspaas).
