The Nationalization of Latvians and the Issue of Serfdom: The Bal ...

Analyzing the veracity of the examined authors’ historical accounts and their social and political critiques of Livonian society highlights a shift to a more anthropocentric, ethnocentric, and polemical approach to dealing with the Latvian serfs that redefined the nature of argumentation in this discourse in the 1780s and 1790s. Hence this work considers a new aspect of agrarian and social reform in Livonia in these two decades—namely, the role that eighteenth-century anthropological,¹⁰ ethnographical, and historical ideas played as agents of social and political change and in invoking a Latvian national and cultural identity. In this respect, Livonia makes an excellent case study.

An important argument of this book, then, is that the “nationalization” of the Latvians occurred as a result of historiographical, anthropological, and ethnographical ideas introduced into the Livonian agrarian and social reform discourse. The reorganization of Livonian society that followed the conclusion of the Great Northern War (1700–1721) adversely affected the rights and conditions of the indigenous Latvian peasantry. Legal and political changes severely impacted the status of the Latvian peasant in the first half of the eighteenth century. The emergence of attempts to reform the Livonian agrarian society in the 1760s was motivated in part by the sincere desire to improve the spiritual and material living and working conditions as well as the status of the Latvian serf. The agrarian and social issues connected to serfdom in Livonia were primary issues of the Livonian Enlightenment. The arguments employed struck a chord of resonance among some enlightened Baltic German landholding squires.

Overall, however, it can be said that the lack of substantial reform and progressive change resulted in a radicalization of the argument for agrarian and social reform through the adaptation of a more vehemently polemical approach and the uptake and incorporation of new historical and anthropological ideas in the arguments focusing on the cultural, social, and national identity and character of the indigenous Latvians. Thus the reason for this study is to shed further light on the interplay of ideas informing the agrarian and social reform discourse in Livonia that led to the nationalization of Latvian identity at the end of the eighteenth century.