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Commentators such as Jürgen Heeg18 have investigated the complex issue of serfdom through an examination of the way Merkel as a writer and publicist criticized Livonia’s feudal agrarian and social structures, casting relations between landholding nobles and serfs in an ethnic light.
Roger Bartlett19 has addressed the issue of serfdom and how Catherine the Great’s political policy and reform agenda played out in Livonia, with particular reference to the authors “J. G. Eisen and G. H. Merkel.” Thomas Taterka’s Nachwort,20 in a rerelease of Merkel’s work of 1796, set out a brief yet concise account of the contemporary scene and issues that formed the backdrop to Merkel’s important work. The institution of serfdom reached its apex in the eighteenth century, in the present-day countries of Latvia and Estonia. The intensification of serfdom in Livonia has been viewed in the critical literature as a major consequence of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). The consequences of this war had a lasting impact on northern Europe. Acknowledgment, too, that the historical origins of the Livonian agrarian constitution dated back to the Baltic crusades in the thirteenth century forms the general outline of the social and political order that was characteristic of Livonia’s Ständegesellschaft.
In 1997, in his Versuch einer Typologie,21 Christoph Schmidt22 addressed the institution of serfdom throughout the Baltic Sea region in a comparative analysis of its historical developments and manifestations in Livonia, Poland, Russia, and other countries. In the view of Schmidt, it was the exceptional military nature of German colonization in the Baltic region that defined the development of agrarian relations and the agrarian constitution in Livonia. Schmidt contrasts the thirteenth-century military colonization of Livonia with that of Prussia. He identifies a number of important factors in this process that would come to have significant consequences in the evolution of agrarian, social, and ethnic relations in Livonia: