Baltic Connections

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.

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.

"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." -- back cover.

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.

This book is about the creation, relocation, and reconstruction of libraries between the late Middle Ages and the Age of Confessionalization, that is, the era of religious division and struggle in Northern Europe following the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the time, different creeds clashed with each other, but it was also a period in which the political and intellectual geography of Europe was redrawn. Centuries-old political, economic, and cultural networks fell apart and were replaced with new ones. Books and libraries were at the centre of these cultural, political, and religious transformations, frequently seized as war booties and appropriated by their new owners in distant locations.

Since the 1990s, Baltic-Russian relations have been amongst the most contentious on the European continent. Energy security concerns, historical legacies, and the status of Russian minorities have all proved key flash points. Baltic-Russian relations have been described as a 'litmus test' of Russia's willingness to leave behind its imperialist ambitions; simultaneously the policies of Tallinn, Riga or Vilnius towards Russia can have a direct impact on EU-Russian and NATO-Russian relations. The Baltic states share similar histories and resources, and face the same geopolitical challenges. All are dependent on Russia for energy yet, as this fascinating study reveals, they have pursued very different foreign policies towards their powerful neighbour. In The Politics of Energy and Memory between the Baltic States and Russia Agnia Grigas provides an unprecedented analysis of contemporary Baltic-Russian relations and identifies the causal factors that drive the foreign policies of the Baltic states in such divergent routes. Supported by case studies on the oil and gas sectors as well as the tug of history, this book is an invaluable resource for scholars and policy makers.