Contagious Coercion: the Effect of Plagues on Serdom in the Baltics

4 Figure 2: The Baltics following the Great Northern War (1700-21) Notes: I focus on the territory of present-day Estonia, which, until 1918, was divided in the province of Estonia and the northern part of the province of Livonia. [...] 12In total, half of the manors were expropriated in the Province of Estonia, a quarter on the island of Saaremaa, and 84% in the Province of Livonia. [...] The abolition of serfdom in the Baltic was the first abolition in the Russian Empire and the only one before the general abolition in 1861. [...] At the beginning of a manor’s entry, a short survey of the manor’s general economic conditions was provided in the form of the number of mills 20Transcriptions of the 1732 Wackenbücher for the province of Estonia were kindly provided by the Esto- nian National Archives. [...] On the household level, the Wackenbücher recorded important demographic information: the number of adult men and women, the number of male and female elderly, and the number of farm hands and maids.