Baltic Essays

In this overview of the Baltic region from the Vikings to the European Union, Michael North presents the sea and the lands that surround it as a Nordic Mediterranean, a maritime zone of shared influence, with its own distinct patterns of trade, cultural exchange, and conflict. Covering over a thousand years in a part of the world where seas have been much more connective than land, The Baltic: A History transforms the way we think about a body of water too often ignored in studies of the world’s major waterways. The Baltic lands have been populated since prehistory by diverse linguistic groups: Balts, Slavs, Germans, and Finns. North traces how the various tribes, peoples, and states of the region have lived in peace and at war, as both global powers and pawns of foreign regimes, and as exceptionally creative interpreters of cultural movements from Christianity to Romanticism and Modernism. He examines the golden age of the Vikings, the Hanseatic League, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, and Peter the Great, and looks at the hard choices people had to make in the twentieth century as fascists, communists, and liberal democrats played out their ambitions on the region’s doorstep. With its vigorous trade in furs, fish, timber, amber, and grain and its strategic position as a thruway for oil and natural gas, the Baltic has been—and remains—one of the great economic and cultural crossroads of the world.

The Baltic in the early modern period has been called a 'Nordic Mediterranean'. In the studies collected here, Professor North is concerned to examine the ways in which this Baltic region became integrated into the international division of labour and the emerging world economy. The volume opens with a new introductory essay, and the first section then focuses on commodities exported to Western Europe - grain, timber, flax, hemp and other raw materials. The following studies examine how this ever growing bulk trade stimulated a flow of money and payments in the opposite direction, and led to the formation of the manorial economy and second serfdom in the grain-producing countries of the Baltic hinterlands.

The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, written by a missionary priest in the early thirteenth century to record the history of the crusades to Livonia and Estonia around 1186-1227, offers one of the most vivid examples of the early thirteenth century crusading ideology in practice. Step by step, it has become one of the most widely read and acknowledged frontier crusading and missionary chronicles. Henry's chronicle offers many opportunities to test and broaden the new approaches and key concepts brought along by recent developments in medieval studies, including the new pluralist definition of crusading and the relationship between the peripheries and core areas of Europe. While recent years have produced a significant amount of new research into Henry of Livonia, much of it has been limited to particular historical traditions and languages. A key objective of this book, therefore, is to synthesise the current state of research for the international scholarly audience. The volume provides a multi-sided and multi-disciplinary companion to the chronicle, and is divided into three parts. The first part, 'Representations,' brings into focus the imaginary sphere of the chronicle - the various images brought into existence by the amalgamation of crusading and missionary ideology and the frontier experience. This is followed by studies on 'Practices,' which examines the chronicle's reflections of the diplomatic, religious, and military practices of the christianisation and colonisation processes in medieval Livonia. The volume concludes with a section on the 'Appropriations,' which maps the reception history of the chronicle: the dynamics of the medieval, early modern and modern national uses and abuses of the text.

Describes and analyzes how the Baltic nations survived 50 years of social disruption, language discrimination and Russian colonialism, and the effect of the Baltic states' stubborn invincibility on the Soviet Union. The history of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are integrated and compared.

The Baltic in the early modern period has been called a 'Nordic Mediterranean'. In the studies collected here, Professor North is concerned to examine the ways in which this Baltic region became integrated into the international division of labour and the emerging world economy. The volume opens with a new introductory essay, and the first section then focuses on commodities exported to Western Europe - grain, timber, flax, hemp and other raw materials. The following studies examine how this ever growing bulk trade stimulated a flow of money and payments in the opposite direction, and led to the formation of the manorial economy and second serfdom in the grain-producing countries of the Baltic hinterlands.

In the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, Northern Europe was a crucible of political, maritime and economic activity. Ships from ports all around the Baltic Sea as well as from the Low Countries plied the Baltic waters, triggering market integration, migration flows, nautical innovations and the dissemination of cultural values. This archival guide is an essential research tool for scholars studying these Baltic connections, providing descriptions of almost 1000 archival collections concerning trade, shipping, merchants, commodities, diplomacy, finances and migration in the years 1450-1800. These rich and varied sources kept at more than 100 repositories in Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia and Sweden are herewith collected for the first time.