Vol. XXXVI · 2005

Alex Drace-Francis

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In this article I intend to continue the critique of Hroch's model of national agitation -and Berend's simplified version thereof -through a survey of the political, institutional, and cultural development of the Romanian population of the Banat from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth century; and an examination of the political choices made by Romanians during the Revolution of 1848 -49 in Central Europe. This history has never been treated in any detail in English, and the Banat Romanians are more or less systematically ignored in most works on Habsburg, Hungarian, and Romanian history, despite the fact that they constituted the largest ethnic group in the Banat and made major and early contributions to the main tenets of Romanian national ideology as a whole.6 This is partly a result of what Oliver Freeman has called "methodological nationalism," namely, the tendency of researchers to assume that the nation whose ideology and identity strategies they claim to be dissecting was unitary in the first place.7 In the case of the Romanians, neither Romanian nor Western historians have made much distinction between the aims and circumstances of the Romanian movements in Transylvania and Hungary.8 A few scholars have mentioned the problem in passing, but so far nobody has taken it up in any detail.9