The Emergence of Independent Estonia

Abstract

The second half of the nineteenth century was a time of major changes in the North-East Baltic region. Perhaps the most significant development was the acquisition of a national identity by the indigenous peoples. The dominant elites in Russia’s Baltic provinces of Estland, Livland, and Kurland were Baltic German landowners, descendants of the crusaders who had subjugated the pagan Latvians and Estonians in the thirteenth century. Though Estland and northern Livland, the territory inhabited by the Estonians, had passed under several different foreign rulers throughout the centuries, political, social, and economic hegemony remained entrenched in the hands of the Baltic German nobility until 1917. The privileges of the Baltic Ritterschaften (corporations of the nobility) had been upheld by the Russian Tsars upon conquering Estland and Livland from Sweden in 1710. The peasants (interchangeable with ‘the Estonians’) were emancipated from serfdom in 1816–19, but could not purchase their own land. Eventually, a series of agrarian reforms that began in 1849 and continued into the 1860s enabled a native Estonian landowning class to emerge.