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).

Introduction. Part 1 - Negotiating Citizenship, Belonging and Social Rights. 1. Negotiating the Right of Residence (Austria, Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century) 2. Neither Citizen nor Foreigner: Gendered Negotiations and Hierarchies of Belonging in Alsace, 1918-1919 3. Foreign Workers in the French Labour Courts: a Battlefield for the Recognition of Social Rights Part 2 - Regulating Seasonal Migrations 4. Pious Guardians: the Swabian Children Association and Public Welfare in the Tyrolean Alps, 1891-1915 5. New Rights and Hierarchies: Regulating Seasonal Farm Labour (Austria, 1918-1938) Part 3 - Cities and the Integration of Migrants. 6. Migration and Municipal Socialism in Imperial German Strasbourg (1871-1914) 7. Who Cares for Foreigners? Dutch Migrants in Prussian Cities, 1870-1933 8. Social Rights at Work: Italian Migrants on the Turin and Munich Labour Markets, 1950-1975. Part 4 - Globalising Social Rights. 9. Guaranteeing the Social Rights of Migrant Workers - a Transnational History (1901-1939) 10. Argentina's Social Policy for Immigrants in the Interwar Period 11. Migrants, Refugees and the Right to Social Assistance in Post-war Italy and France (1945-1961)

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.