Search results

Reflecting debate around hospitality and the Baltic Sea region, this open access book taps into wider discussions about reception, securitization and xenophobic attitudes towards migrants and strangers. Focusing on coastal and urban areas, the collection presents an overview of the responses of host communities to guests and strangers in the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, from the early eleventh century to the twentieth. The chapters investigate why and how diverse categories of strangers including migrants, war refugees, prisoners of war, merchants, missionaries and vagrants, were portrayed as threats to local populations or as objects of their charity, shedding light on the current predicament facing many European countries. Emphasizing the Baltic Sea region as a uniquely multi-layered space of intercultural encounter and conflict, this book demonstrates the significance of Northeastern Europe to migration history.

1. Introduction: Baltic Hospitality, 1000–1900; Wojtek Jezierski, Sari Nauman, Christina Reimann, Leif Runefelt -- Part I: Medieval Hospitalities -- 2. Spaces of Hospitality on the Missionary Baltic Rim, Tenth–Twelfth Centuries; Wojtek Jezierski -- 3. Ladoga as a Gateway on the Road from the Varangians to the Greeks: Icelandic Sagas on Security Measures, Eleventh–Thirteenth Centuries; Tatjana N. Jackson -- 4. Merchants as Guests: Laws and Conditions of Baltic Trade Hospitality, Twelfth–Fourteenth Centuries; Tobias Boestad -- 5. German Merchants in Novgorod: Hospitality and Hostility, Twelfth–Fifteenth Centuries; Pavel V. Lukin -- 6. Guests or Strangers? The Reception of Visiting Merchants in the Towns of the Baltic Rim, Sixteenth Century; Lovisa Olsson -- Part II: Early Modern Hospitalities -- 7. Ritualized Hospitality: The Negotiations of the Riga Capitulation and the Adventus of Boris Sheremetev in July 1710; Dorothée Goetze -- 8. Receiving the Enemy: Involuntary Hospitality and Prisoners of War in Denmark and Sweden, 1700–1721; Olof Blomqvist -- 9. Conditional Hospitality Towards Internal Refugees: Sweden during the Great Northern War, 1700-1721; Sari Nauman -- 10. Between Home and the City: Receiving and Controlling Strangers in Altona, 1740–1765; Johannes Ljungberg -- 11. Friend or Foe? Soldiers and Civilians in Helsinki, 1747–1807; Sofia Gustafsson -- Part III: Modern Hospitalities -- 12. Threat or Nuisance? Foreign Street Entertainers in the Swedish Press, 1800–1880; Leif Runefelt -- 13. Hospitality and Rejection: Peddlers and Host Communities in the Northern Baltic, 1850–1920; Anna Sundelin and Johanna Wassholm -- 14. Hospitality and Securitization in Times of Cholera: Eastern European Migrants in Rotterdam and Antwerp, 1880–1914; Christina Reimann.