EESTI AJALOOTEADUSE UUED SUUNAD 21. SAJANDIL
NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN ESTONIAN HISTORICAL RE­SEARCH IN THE TWENTY­-FIRST CENTURY

Summary/Abstract: This article provides an overview of new research trends in the study of Estonian history in the twentyfirst century. The paper focuses on the emergence of trans¬national history, memory studies, the history of science and environmental history. We argue that these research fields have brought into focus previously marginalised social groups and agents, and highlighted the political nature of any kind of historical scholarship. Research carried out in these new frameworks has also helped to challenge methodological nationalism, pointing to the role of nonEstonian actors in the history of the country, and to the entanglement of Estonian history with other regions. The paper is not limited to historical research in the traditional sense, but takes a more pluralist approach, covering also the developments in other humanities that utilise historical sources. We argue that a considerable amount of new innovative historical research is done in adjacent disciplines, such as semiotics, literature studies, and ethnology. While historians have developed transnational history by studying the history of the Baltic provinces in the multiethnic Russian empire, literary scholars have discussed the ways in which early modern and modern Baltic history can be approached from entangled perspectives. In recent years, those scholars have argued for the primacy of colonialism as a central concept for the understanding of Estonian and Baltic history. The concept has been used widely in studies of medieval colonisation, as well as in connection to the complex and tenuous colonial relations be-tween Baltic Germans and Estonians. Nevertheless, a colonial history of Estonia would benefit greatly from broader discussions on the adaptability of the term and its related concepts for different time periods and contexts of the region’s history. So far, debates on colonialism have focused on the possibilities of analysing the Soviet regime as a form of colonialism, once again driven primarily by literary scholars. Interdisciplinary dialogues have also been central to memory studies, which has resulted in some of the most substantial and prolific scholarship in recent years. While much of that research has focused on analysing national sites of memory, other scholars, particularly ethnologists, have pointed to the conservative nature of Estonian memory politics and highlighted countermemories and marginalised voices otherwise obscured in collective memory. Estonian environmental history is likewise strongly influenced by other disciplines in the humanities, especially ecocriticism and ecosemiotics, both of which have long traditions in local scholarship. The development of the field could yet benefit from stronger connections between the histories of technology, economy and society, on the one hand, and the analysis of cultural imaginaries, on the other hand. In sum, the developments described above have all emphasised the study of cultural representations. All the aforementioned fields would benefit greatly from entangling the studies of cultural imaginaries with the studies of social and economic history, and from a stronger emphasis on the analysis of power relations.

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