This collection presents research results of the Collaborative Research Centre 600 ‘Strangers and Poor People. Changing Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion from Classical Antiquity to the Present Day’ at Trier University. It deals with central problems of social inclusion in societies of Europe and the Mediterranean World since Antiquity. The articles assembled here explore fundamental dimensions of the self-concepts of societies and social groups. From the perspectives of different disciplines, as History, History of Law, Literature Studies and Social Sciences, they focus on five main research areas: theoretical concepts of inclusion and exclusion, rights of membership and the inclusion of strangers in political spaces, religious dimensions of poor relief from the Middle Ages up into the twentieth Century, poor law and politics of poverty and the semantics of inclusion and exclusion.