• Vita

    Beate Althammer studied History, Economic History and Political Science at the University of Zurich. In 2000, she received her doctorate in History from Trier University. From 2002 to 2012, she worked in the collaborative research centre “Strangers and Poor People: Changing Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion from Classical Antiquity to the Present Day” at Trier University, where she also earned her Habilitation in 2016. She held Fellowships at the German Historical Institute London, the German Historical Institute Paris, and at the international research centre “Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History” (Humboldt University Berlin). From 2015 to 2019 she taught at Leuphana University Lüneburg, and from 2018 to 2024 she was principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project “The Borders of the Welfare State: Migration, Social Rights and Expulsion (1850-1933)” at Humboldt University Berlin.

  • Research Project

    Crime, Law and Mercy: A History of Pardoning in Modern Europe

    Around 1800, criminal justice systems changed profoundly in many European countries. The division of powers, an independent judiciary, systemized penal codes and standardized procedures aimed to guarantee the principle of equality before the law. Nevertheless, courts did not always have the final word: The royal prerogative of mercy, though much criticized in the age of Enlightenment, remained highly relevant also after 1800, and it lives on up until today in the special rights of heads of state. It drew legitimacy on the one hand from traditional conceptions of sovereign power, and on the other from perceived discrepancies between the formal egalitarianism of legal provisions and genuine justice that, in certain cases, must allow for exceptions. Other than with respect to the early modern period, historical research on the nineteenth and (early) twentieth centuries has not paid much attention to this aspect of the history of crime and law so far. This project explores the shifting practices of petitioning for, and granting, pardon in modern Europe in a comparative perspective (Prussia, England, France), asking how they reflect tensions between legal unity and pluralism.

  • Selected Publications

    Althammer, Beate (ed.): Citizenship, Migration and Social Rights: Historical Experiences from the 1870s to the 1970s, London 2023.

    Althammer, Beate, What it Means to Have Nothing: Poverty and the Idea of Human Dignity in Nineteenth-Century Germany, in: Central European History 55, no. 4 (2022), 473-492.

    Althammer, Beate, Vagabunden. Eine Geschichte von Armut, Bettel und Mobilität im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung, 1815-1933, Essen 2017.

    Althammer, Beate/ Raphael, Lutz/ Stazic-Wendt, Tamara (eds.), Rescuing the Vulnerable: Poverty, Welfare and Social Ties in Modern Europe, New York/ Oxford 2016.

    Althammer, Beate/ Gerstenmayer, Christina (eds.), Bettler und Vaganten in der Neuzeit (1500-1933). Eine kommentierte Quellenedition, Essen 2013

    Althammer, Beate, Herrschaft, Fürsorge, Protest. Eliten und Unterschichten in den Textilgewerbestädten Aachen und Barcelona 1830-1870, Bonn 2002.