Andre Kruusmaa compared the different facets of the arguments and ideas in favour of serfdom and slavery, such as how and on what grounds slavery or serfdom was justified, what role slave or serf uprisings played, and how these examples were used in the pro-slavery and pro-serfdom arguments. Kruusmaa has also looked at the context of the legal system, the paternalistic reasoning and the role of churches and the clergy in supporting these systems. Finally, he examined how the abolitionists, or anti-slavery men and their agitation, were opposed by the advocates of serfdom and slavery, and what the racist justification was, which was somewhat different in the context of the Western Hemisphere and the Baltic provinces, but also shared some similarities.
Kruusmaa was also interested in the extent of Baltic Germans' knowledge about slavery and pro-slavery ideas and arguments in the context of the British Empire and the United States. He came to the conclusion that the well-informed Baltic Germans had a fairly substantial understanding of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. References to slavery in those regions were also used in their own writings and, at times, by supporters of serfdom to reinforce their arguments. Slavery-related topics were also widely covered in newspapers in the Baltic provinces, giving the reader a fairly good overview of events taking place across the ocean.
At the same time, Kruusmaa focused on the knowledge that American and British people had about serfdom in the Baltic provinces. This is a perspective that has previously received little attention. It turned out that the British and Americans also knew about serfdom in the Baltic provinces. For example, some of the best-known Southern apologists for slavery, Thomas Roderick Dew and George Fitzhugh, used the examples of the Baltic provinces in their pro-slavery arguments and in widely-known writings. In their texts, they referred to the abolition of serfdom in the Baltic provinces as a failed experiment and a cautionary tale that should never be repeated in the context of the American South with the emancipation of slaves.
Similarly, British proponents of slavery also referred to the abolition of serfdom in the Baltic provinces as a negative example, which was supposed to prove that the British Empire should not repeat the mistakes of the Russian Empire in the Baltic provinces. More broadly, in the context of the 18th and 19th centuries, slavery and serfdom were treated relatively similarly and equivalences were drawn between them – that is, in the imagination of Americans and the British, serfdom and slavery were seen as fundamentally similar institutions in many respects.
Andre Kruusmaa from the School of Humanities defended his doctoral thesis " Pro-slavery and Pro-serfdom Thought in the Age of Abolition and Emancipation: Russian Baltic Provinces and the New World " on May 28. Supervisors were Ulrike Plath, Professor at Tallinn University and Karsten Brüggemann, Professor at Tallinn University. Opponents were Amanda Bellows, Teaching Associate and Advisor at the New School and Pärtel Piirimäe, Professor at the University of Tartu.
