page_title: History of Riga
section_title: Industrial harbor city of the Russian Empire
hierarchical_section_title: History of Riga / Industrial harbor city of the Russian Empire
caption_attribution_description: Kalkstrasse and the promenade, Riga, Russia, (i.e., Latvia) English: A view of Riga on a postcard from around 1900. Español: Postal de Riga en 1900. Português: Uma vista de Riga por volta de 1900 em um cartão postal da época. Română: Riga, vedere pe o carte poştalǎ de prin anul 1900.
context_page_description: The history of Riga, the capital of Latvia, begins as early as the 2nd century with a settlement, the Duna urbs, at a natural harbor not far upriver from the mouth of the Daugava River. Later settled by Livs and Kurs, it was already an established trade center in the early Middle Ages along the Dvina-Dnieper trade route to Byzantium. Christianity had come to Latvia as early as the 9th century, but it was the arrival of the Crusades at the end of the 12th century which brought the Germans and forcible conversion to Christianity; the German hegemony instituted over the Baltics lasted until independence—and is still preserved today in Riga's Jugendstil architecture.
  From the 13th century to the birth of nationalism in the 19th and independence in the 20th, Latvia's and Riga's history are intertwined, a chronicle of the rise and fall of surrounding foreign powers over the Latvians and their territory. As a member of the Hanseatic League, Riga's prosperity grew throughout the 13th–15th centuries—with Riga to become a major center of commerce and later, industry, of whatever empire it found itself subject of.
context_section_description: By the end of the 19th. century Riga had become one of the most industrially advanced and economically prosperous cities in the entire Empire, and of the 800,000 industrial workers in the Baltic provinces, over half worked there. By 1900, Riga was the third largest city in Russia after Moscow and Saint Petersburg in terms of numbers of industrial workers.
  During these many centuries of war and changes of power in the Baltic, the Baltic Germans in Riga, successors to Albert's merchants and crusaders, clung to their dominant position despite demographic changes. Riga even employed German as its official language of administration until the imposition of Russian language in 1891 as the official language in the Baltic provinces. All birth, marriage and death records were kept in German up to that year. Latvians began to supplant Germans as the largest ethnic group in the city in the mid-19th century, however, and by 1897 the population was 45% Latvian (up from 23.6% in 1867), 23.8% German (down from 42.9% in 1867 and 39.7% in 1881), 16.1% Russian, 6% Jewish, 4.8% Polish, 2.3% Lithuanian, and 1.3% Estonian. By 1913 Riga was just 13.5% German. The rise of a Latvian bourgeoisie made Riga a center of the Latvian National Awakening with the founding of the Riga Latvian Association in 1868 and the organization of the first national song festival in 1873. The nationalist movement of the Young Latvians was followed by the socialist New Current during the city's rapid industrialization, culminating in the 1905 Russian Revolution led by the Latvian Social Democratic Workers' Party.
caption: A view of Riga on a postcard from around 1900.
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