At the start of the eighteenth century, the Baltic littoral was a battleground for regional powers, but by the end it had become part of the western borderlands of the Russian Empire. Sweden had been expelled from the eastern shore of the Baltic by the 1720s and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth appeared increasingly unable to keep Russia from meddling in its internal affairs. In western and central Europe, competing powers fought a series of wars about questions of succession while seeking to consolidate European colonies in the New World. At the same time, innovative thinkers in France, England, and the German lands launched and presided over the Enlightenment, writing timeless works about the social contract, the perfectibility of man, and the separation of powers.

In Livonia and Estonia, the new Russian ruling elite, having replaced the Swedish overlords, struck deals with regional and local landowning nobilities in order to secure social and political order and to establish effective administration of the enserfed peasant populations – the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians. Old administrative boundaries were reaffirmed and new ones created in a manner that cut through the language communities of old Livonia, dividing the Estonians in two. The Latvian population remained divided between southern Livonia, on the one hand, and the Duchy of Courland and Latgale, on the other, both the latter still under the authority of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.