Completed research projects

Global port cities are a microcosm of the challenges, problems and possibilities of the present, the future and the past: economic progress and ecological threats, local city development and globalization, multi-ethnicity and migration. The research project „The Cosmopolitan City. Riga as a Global Port and International Capital of Trade (1861-1939)” aims to map Riga as a global port city using historical GIS as a tool to analyze its economic interdependencies and trade networks. The study examines the contribution of cosmopolitan merchants and polyglot entrepreneurs for the city’s development and its rise as a metropolis. The project also emphasizes networks with trading partners in Great Britain, Germany and Russia, and to state institutions in St. Petersburg, Berlin and Riga.
The relatively long research period 1861 to 1939 allows a longue durée approach and the comparison of two very different time periods: 1) Riga before World War I, a multi-ethnic economic metropolis and major port of the Russian Empire, in which the city’s Baltic Germans dominated both economy and trade; and 2) Riga after World War I as capital of Latvia, an independent nation-state in which Latvians and Germans had to cooperate for the city’s economic revival.
Due to the transnational environment in which they operated and their international networks, entrepreneurs and merchants tended to be cosmopolitan-minded and more “a-national” in their approaches – despite this being a period of strong nationalist sentiments. At least before the 1930s, national differences and inter-ethnic conflicts were less strong in business and trade since everyone had the same goal: The development and preservation of Riga’s port and its economic success.
Link to project website

In the Russian Empire, Jews were among the groups most associated with commerce and entrepreneurship. Indeed, many Jewish merchants were visible actors in the imperial Russian business world, some of them partially integrated into the society’s upper classes. At the same time, the association with commerce was one of the factors that led to Jews’ outsider status in imperial Russian society. Previous research has often presupposed an inherent connection between Jewish economic, communal and religious practices, and capitalism. The proposed project presents capitalist techniques of commerce as a novelty in the life of Eastern European Jews. It asks about ways in which Jews adopted these techniques, while emphasizing the role played by the German-speaking business world in Baltic cities, and looking at the connections between Jews and Baltic Germans.
The system of double-entry bookkeeping, originally invented in 14th and 15th century Italy, was one of the most consequential innovations in the history of capitalism. The research project investigates the dissemination of double-entry accounting and other modern business practices in the western provinces of imperial Russia, asks about its cultural influences, and examines the role of Jewish and German business cultures in this process. The project targets two fields: 1) socio-economic history of Russia’s western borderlands and 2) Jewish cultural history. It analyzes the spread of commercial knowledge among Jews in the western provinces of imperial Russia, in particular in the area of today’s Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine in the 18th and 19th century. It analyzes files of customs offices, commercial courts and business journals as well as a set of new sources (such as accounting books and manuals) to offer novel insights into how Jewish culture entered modernity. In the course of our research we also aim to shed light on aspects of the general development of capitalist consciousness in imperial Russia.