In looking backwards to the First World War and the centuries beyond, it is clear that, in the struggle between the European regimes over the Baltic Sea, the position of Germany and Russia overshadowed that of all other powers in the end. With regard to the German Empire after 1871, as to the policy of Prussia before that, the absence of serious Russo-German conflict over the Baltic region owed much to the favoured position formerly secured by the Baltic German aristocracy in what were then the Baltic provinces of Russia. Here, Estonia, Livonia and Courland must be distinguished from Lithuania, with its largely Polish nobility. The local power enjoyed by the great medieval German colonizers of the Baltic remained largely intact after the provinces became part of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century. The four great Ritterschaften of Estonia, Livonia, Courland and the Islands of Oesel continued to rule loyally for successive Tsars, on behalf of, but increasingly at the expense of, the native Estonians and Latvians. Since the initial failure of the Teutonic Order to subjugate Lithuania closed the provinces to an influx of German farmers, the Baltic barons developed as a dominant caste on the land and in the towns. The long process of readjustment to which this ultimately condemned them was only too apparent by the early nineteenth century, since the land reforms which the German baronial caste felt compelled to introduce then were certain to benefit the Latvian and Estonian peasantry in the long run.