The Editors: Andreas Gestrich, Director of the German Historical Institute London and Professor of Modern History at the Trier University (on leave); research on the history of poverty and welfare.Lutz Raphael, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Trier University; research on the role of experts in the modern welfare state.Herbert Uerlings, Professor of Modern German Literature at Trier University; research on cross-cultural effects in German literature.

• Contents: Lutz Raphael: General introduction – Lutz Raphael: Royal protection, poor relief statute, and expulsion. Types of state and modes of inclusion / exclusion of strangers and poor people in Europe and the Mediterranean world since Antiquity – Cornelia Bohn: Inclusion and exclusion: Theories and findings. From exclusion from the community to including exclusion – Siegfried Schieder/Rachel Folz/Simon Musekamp: The social construction of European solidarity: The French, German, and Swedish debate on EU-policy towards the states of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific (ACP) – Helga Schnabel-Schüle: Sovereignty change - On the potential of a research category – Helga Schnabel-Schüle: ‘Who belongs?’ - rights of membership and the inclusion of strangers in political spaces – Stefan Pfeiffer: The Alexandrian Jews and their agon of affiliation: the conflict of the years 38-41 A.D. – Altay Coşkun: ‘Civitas Romana’ and the inclusion of strangers in the Roman Republic: the case of the Social War – Christoph Cluse: Jewish community and civic commune in the high Middle Ages – Boris Olschewski/Bernhard Schmitt: The oath of homage in the context of sovereignty change. On the significance of a legal relict in the case of the Polish-Lithuanian partitions (1772-1795) – Sarah Vanessa Losego/Lutz Raphael: Practices of naturalisation and transformations of population: The case of the industrial Bassin of Longwy (Meurthe-et-Moselle) 1946-1990 – Markus Linden: From strangers to citizens. Modes and perspectives of political and social inclusion of immigrants in Germany – Sebastian Schmidt: Religious dimensions of poor relief from the Middle Ages up into the twentieth century – Monika Escher-Apsner: Serving the poor and strangers? ‘Confraternitates exulum’/‘Confraternitates pauperum’ and their modes of inclusion and exclusion – Sebastian Schmidt: «Pleasing to God and beneficial to man». On the confessional similarities and differences of early modern poor relief – Bernhard Schneider/Patrick Bircher: Catholic poverty discourses in the early nineteenth century – Beate Althammer/Inga Brandes/Katrin Marx-Jaskulski: Religiously motivated charitable work in modern times. Catholic congregations in the Rhineland and Ireland – Franz Dorn: Basic principles of poor relief from late Antiquity to the nineteenth century – Katrin Dort/Christian Reuther: Poor relief in the Carolingian capitularies – Alexander Wagner: Poor relief in early modern (legal) theory and legal systems – Andreas Gestrich/Jens Gründler: The Irish in Glasgow during the food shortages of 1846-1848 and 1878/79 - Aspects of inclusion and exclusion – Herbert Uerlings: Semantics of Inclusion/Exclusion – Philine Helas: Representations of St. Martin dividing his cloak with a beggar as a gauge of changing social practices in late medieval Europe – Ludwig Maria Vogl-Bienek: ‘From life’: The use of the magic lantern in nineteenth-century social work – Herbert Uerlings: Stigma ‘Gypsy’. An enduring semantics of exclusion – Iulia-Karin Patrut: «Is it worth the trouble to defame a Gypsy?» On Aryanism, Indo-Germanic ideology and the discourses on foreign peoples in the second half of the nineteenth century.