Citizenship, Migration and Social Rights: Historical Experiences from the 1870s to the 1970s

The tensions between European conceptions of the welfare state and transnational migration have caused heated political, public, and academic debates over the last decades. Historiography, however, has not yet explored in depth how European societies struggled with this dilemma-filled relationship in the formative phases of modern welfare states from the late nineteenth century to the post-war era.

The present volume contributes to filling this gap and thus to putting a highly topical issue into historical perspective. The focus is on Europe, but with a wide geographic scope that reaches also across the Atlantic. Following an introductory chapter, eleven case studies deal with four themes. The first part explores the agency of migrants in local-level administrative and judicial procedures that controlled practical access to formal rights. The second section investigates special regulations developed for seasonal labour migrants employed mainly in agriculture. The third part looks at the role of urban social policies in attracting, integrating, but also excluding both domestic and foreign migrants. The final section addresses the gradual globalisation of migrants’ social rights through international conventions.

The book will be of interest not only to historians of welfare, migration, and citizenship, but also to social scientists as well as to graduate students in these fields.

Beate Althammer is a researcher at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany, with main interests in the social history of modern Europe. Her publications include the monograph Vagabunden (2017) and the journal article "‘Welfare Does Not Know Any Borders’ – Negotiations on the Transnational Assistance of Migrants before the World Wars" (2020).