Projekt

This project examines the transnational development of the German welfare state, often seen as a pioneer in modern welfarism. Richards pursues a multilayered history, one that looks discursively both at intellectual and political exchanges, at the top, and from below, ethnographically, at how everyday practices, gender roles, working-class sociability and political activism, migration, and religion interacted with the introduction of social insurance in Germany from the early 1880s onward. This project constitutes a transnational history of the German welfare state because it will turn on how modern welfarism developed not just in Germany but through the latter. Richards explores the connections and lines of conflict between state, society, and culture in this story, but as set within a global community of wealthy states and international bodies that sought to come to grips with the effects of industrialization and capitalism.

• Prof. Dr. Paul Nolte

  Freie Universität Berlin
  Fachbereich Geschichts- u. Kulturwissenschaften
  Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut
  Neuere Geschichte / Zeitgeschichte
  Berlin
  

• Dr. Chase Richards

  University of Pennsylvania
  Department of History
  University of Pennsylvania
  Philadelphia
  USA