Page 141 [141]
OCR
HRVOJE VOLNER organization of necessary secondary schools, such as the agricultural and forestry school in Krizevci, and later the appropriate faculties as well, and the organization of the Forest service in the Provincial Government in Zagreb and others). These countries (namely Croatia and Slavonia, later also Vojna Krajina) set free the workforce from centuries-old ties of feud, but imposed a tax on the vast masses of peasants that would force them to sell land and also cause a separation of cooperative property, emigration to overseas countries, as well as the conversion to the proletariat. This time, in the interwar period, is remembered by the fact that the Banate of Croatia was “only exploiting the workforce, and therefore there is a million Croats overseas,” or “during the Austro-Hungarian we exported manpower instead of goods. Nowadays, we should not do that (April 1930 A/N), even if we could. Nowadays, we should export goods.”” In the period between 1880 and 1921, the population employed in the field of agriculture decreased slightly from 83% to 75.3%, and the main cause for that was the high birthrate and emigration of the excess population from the arable land to the cities of Croatia and Slavonia that slowly grew, but also emigration abroad." In his valuable paper “The agrarian crisis in Croatia from 1873 to 1895” Rudolf Biéani¢ explains the causes of the structural crisis in Croatia, and by doing so he also reveals the real consequences of the penetration of foreign capital and the intentions of the holder of modernization in political and economic terms. He claims that the direction of economic development in the 19" century went towards the total abolition of feudalism and towards the development and strengthening of civil society and capitalism as the basic economic system. He points out that economists, while analyzing the causes of economic decline, often forget that peasants and young-capitalist countries can ascribe their decline to a huge burden of the tax pressure of the state apparatus, which is reflected in the indirect exploitation of peasants. A farmer, since he was not able to arrange the sale of his products (through cooperatives) represents a damaged party when having to sell toa middleman. For example, during the agrarian crisis, when the price of wheat fell by 50% on the world market, that fall was over two-thirds in the export country. The autarkic peasant economy provided everything necessary for an individual household, except tax money and luxury goods, which gradually penetrated society (e.g., sugar and petroleum), and village consumption was minimal for the entire period until the end of World War II. The domestic elite at 2 Drzavni arhiv u Osijeku (u nastavku DAOS) 223, box 121, Zapisnik plenarne sjednice 6.4.1930. Govor ministra Demetrovica 13 Rudolf Bicanic: Agrarna kriza u Hrvatskoj 1873-1895, Zagreb, 1937, 12; Ivo Goldstein: Hrvatska 1918-2008, Zagreb, EPH-LIBER, 2008, 79-80; Mira Kolar-Dimitrijevic: Kratak osvrt na povijest suma Hrvatske i Slavonije od 1850. godine do Prvog svjetskog rata, Ekonomska i ekohistorija, Vol. 4, No. 1, Zagreb, 2008, 74-82. + 140 +
