Publications

This book provides a thought-provoking critical analysis of the functionality of regional trade regimes in the Global South. It examines four regional trade agreements (RTAs) – the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) and the United States-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement (USMCA). Ngangjoh Hodu and Ajibo argue that while there has been immense enthusiasm amongst countries in the Global South to create RTAs, this has not translated into concerted efforts to make the RTAs work as envisaged, resulting in RTAs that are largely lacking in concreteness. In this innovative work, the authors invite international economic lawyers and other stakeholders to reflect on how normative beliefs and interests inform inter-state relations and thereby, the law of regional economic community. In so doing, it argues that the idea of prosperity underpinning RTAs as they currently exist is more of a mirage than reality.

Collins C. Ajibo is associate professor of Law, Property and Commercial Law at the University of Nigeria. His research focuses on Corporate Law, Capital Market Law, Sustainability, and International Economic Law. He is a recipient of the FRIAS Sustainable Governance Senior Fellowship Programme for Researchers from Africa. His FRIAS research project (2024/25) examined existing gaps in the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), which the book elaborates on.

Yenkong Ngangjoh Hodu is a professor of International Law and was also Head of the Manchester University Law School, UK. He was recently the Director of Studies at the Hague Academy of International Law.

This compilation brings together seminal essays by Almut Suerbaum with critical responses from colleagues, providing a nuanced perspective on her contributions.

The essays explore themes such as the genres of religious song and mystical writings, as well as the dynamics between Latin and vernacular traditions, and courtly and religious spheres. The volume highlights Suerbaum’s methodological approach in bridging diverse media, languages, and scholarly communities.

During his research stay at FRIAS as an Early Career Fellow, Linus Ubl organised a workshop and concert with Racha Kirakosian, the result of which can be found in this collection of essays.

Linus Ubl is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Jerusalem.

Racha Kirakosian is a professor for medieval German at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Previously, she held positions at Harvard University and the University of Oxford.

This two-volume study traces developments in English narrative structure from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, building on the theses set out in Monika Fludernik’s award-winning Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996).

Developments in Narrative Structure analyzes the medieval verse and prose romance, verse and prose hagiography, the fabliau, historical writing, letters, the early modern romance and low-style prose as well as the epic. Deploying linguistic and narratological methodology, the study provides a wide-ranging survey of how narrative develops and diversifies during these five centuries. It discusses continuities and discontinuities, as well as functional repurposing of familiar strategies, and traces the complex and often contradictory changes in form and function. The analyses moreover allow for a comparison between developments in verse and prose texts from a chronological as well as intergeneric perspective.

This authoritative work is an invaluable resource for literary scholars, linguists, and especially to narratologists and scholars of historical pragmatics. Among literature specialists, it will be of interest to literary historians, medievalists, early modern scholars, and for those interested in the rise of the novel and its antecedents.

Monika Fludernik is a Professor of English Literature and Narratology at the University of Freiburg. Developments in Narrative Structure is a result of her 2019-2020 stay at FRIAS as a senior fellow.

No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organise our politics. Sven Beckert situates the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework in this fascinating new book.

Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from merchant communities across Asia, Africa and Europe, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. Then it burst onto the world scene, as European states and merchants built a powerful alliance that would propel them across the oceans. This epic drama corresponded at no point to an idealised dream of free markets. All along, state-backed institutions and imperial expansions shaped its dynamics.

Capitalism decentres the European perspective, highlighting agency, resistance, innovation and ruthless coercion around the world through to the present with the rise of Asian economies, particularly China. Sven Beckert doesn’t merely add up capitalism’s debits and credits in this monumental book, but allows us to think afresh about the past to help us re-imagine the future.

As Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, Sven Beckert researches and teaches the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political and transnational dimensions. He was a Marie S. Curie Fellow at FRIAS in 2019.

Understandings of Black-Jewish relations have been notable for the near consensus among scholars that the Yiddish press repeatedly condemned discrimination and prejudice against African Americans, and highlighted the similarities between the situation of Jews in Eastern Europe and Blacks in America. This book argues that this view covers just a sliver of the varied representations of Black women and men. East European Jewish culture during the immigration era was not uniformly supportive of Black Americans as those interpretations suggest.

Crude Creatures draws on a mixture of previously unexplored Yiddish press, theatre, and literature from Eastern Europe and the United States through 1929 to examine how Black Africans and African Americans were depicted. It charts a significant gap between the sincere condemnation of lynching, violence against Black Americans, and racial segregation on the one hand, and the ways in which Jewish authors, newspapers, playwrights, actors, and theater managers actually represented Black people on the other. While most East European Jews would not have seen a Black person before their arrival in America, they had already acquired preconceived imagery of Black people through rabbinic exegesis, pious advice, travel narratives (either original or adapted from other languages), folklore, scientific explorations, pulp literature, press reports, political rhetoric, and educational materials. Thus, Yiddish writers commonly described Black people as cannibals, oversexed, prone to violence, childlike, or just happy-go-lucky people.

Crude Creatures provides a critical revision, correcting the accepted rosy narrative of Black women and men’s portrayals in Yiddish culture, and highlighting what we can learn from these representations about how immigrant groups integrated their own cultures into American racial hierarchy and vocabulary.

Gil Ribak is an Associate Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Arizona. Crude Creatures is the result of his 2021-22 stay at FRIAS as a Marie S. Curie Fellow.

Few countries are more haunted by the darker aspects of their history than Germany. Nazi crimes continue to cast a long shadow at home and abroad. Germans have nevertheless managed to put their violent, genocidal past behind them, creating a peaceful and prosperous democracy at the heart of Europe.

In this refreshing book, Andrew I. Port tells the story of that extraordinary transformation. Tracing the histories of the Eastern and Western halves of postwar Germany in tandem, he highlights their obvious differences and unexpected commonalities. This novel approach explains not only the country’s many accomplishments since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also the challenges it has faced – from the difficulty of unifying two distinct societies to violent forms of xenophobia and the rise of extremist parties. Whether the Federal Republic remains a stable and successful power is the new “German Question” of the twenty-first century.

Das Wohl aller Menschen bei moralischen und politischen Entscheidungen zu berücksichtigen – das ist heute für viele zumindest als Ideal gerechtfertigt. Aber schon immer gegeben und universell verbreitet ist ein solches Menschheitsethos nicht. Wann und wo ist es also entstanden – und warum eigentlich? Ist es eine Besonderheit der jüdisch-christlichen oder der westlich-aufklärerischen Tradition? Und wie hängt seine Entstehung mit der Geschichte imperialer Weltherrschaft zusammen? In seinem faszinierenden Buch folgt Hans Joas diesem Menschheitsethos in globaler Perspektive.

Von der sogenannten »Achsenzeit« ausgehend, zeichnet er dessen Entstehung in der griechischen Antike, in Judentum und Christentum, in Indien und China nach und betrachtet es im Zusammenhang mit imperialen Reichsbildungen bis hin zum Kolonialismus, Faschismus und Kommunismus. Kann es einen Universalismus ohne Imperialismus überhaupt geben? Und wie steht der Islam zu den achsenzeitlichen Entwürfen eines Menschheitsethos? Joas’ Antworten auf diese großen Fragen fügen sich zu einem Opus Magnum, mit dem er seine vielbeachteten Arbeiten zur Geschichte von Religion und politischer Macht krönt.

“The period between the seventh and fourteenth centuries is hardly thought of as an era of globalization. Entire societies in the Americas, Australia, and Oceania developed in relative isolation from other parts of the world. Even on the interconnected landmass of Eurafrasia, many people had little to do with processes of transregional exchange.

Yet the period 600–1350 CE in fact witnessed an explosion of connectivity amid the consolidation of sophisticated approaches to human organization. Flows of people, goods, and ideas across regional boundaries intensified, changing lives at all social levels, from rulers to the enslaved. In the Americas, large cities and north-south trade networks took shape. The Arabic-Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, along with the Mongol expansion of the thirteenth, tied together diverse polities from southeast Asia to sub-Saharan Africa. Regions also became more culturally and politically integrated: Latin-Christian models of social organization spread across Europe; the Sinitic written language drew eastern Eurasia into a common elite culture; and the accumulation of significant agricultural surpluses in the Indian subcontinent supported the emergence of a settled political order.

Entangled Worlds sees the completion of the magisterial six-volume set A History of the World, offering an authoritative introduction to a vibrant era of global history. The distinguished contributors make clear that there never was a stagnant “Middle Ages” wedged between Antiquity and Modernity but instead a period defined by decisive strides toward global connection, urbanization, and the cultural and political formations we live with today.” (Harvard University Press)

Jürgen Osterhammel is a Distinguished Fellow since 2019. He is the General Editor of the Series “A History of the World” along with Akira Iriye. This specific Publication is edity by Daniel G. König.

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a compelling account of the Soviet dissident movement that defied the Kremlin and hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. Benjamin Nathans chronicles the dramatic stories of individuals—from renowned figures like Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to lesser-known activists—who used Soviet law to challenge state power. Drawing on personal diaries, memoirs, letters, and KGB records, Nathans reveals how these dissidents, acting like free people in an unfree society, became symbols of resistance. This vivid narrative not only illuminates their impact on the 20th century but also resonates with ongoing struggles for freedom today.

Benjamin Nathans was FRIAS Marie S. Curie FCFP Fellow 2022/23. As for October 2024, he is Professor of History at the University of Pennsyvania