19 January 2026, 16:15-17:45 (in person)

FU Berlin, FMI, Room A336, Koserstr. 20, 14195 Berlin

At the end of the nineteenth century, Imperial Germany was at the center of the global narcotics trade. Heroin and cocaine — both developed by German chemists – were mass produced by German pharmaceutical giants and exported around the world to markets where they ranged from legal to highly restricted. At that time, the German state saw the calls from other Great Powers to create the first system of global drug regulation as a threat to its economic position and emerging Weltpolitik. Yet, moving forward a century, the Federal Republic of Germany had completely reversed this role as a spoiler to acting as the driving force behind the integration of anti-narcotics policing in Europe following reunification. Fearing a destabilizing mass influx of narcotics across its now porous post-Cold War border, the FRG set out to Europeanize its anti-narcotics program to use the integration of the continent as a vehicle to reinforce its own national sovereignty – in contrast to its Imperial Era predecessor which had sought to do the same by resisting similar measures. Through the lens of the emergence of international trafficking and the initiatives to regulate and prohibit it, this project aims to rethink the place of Germany in a globalizing world order as it transitioned from Empire to democracy, Nazism, the divisions of the Cold War and finally reunification at the center of an integrating and disintegrating Europe. The history of global drug trafficking not only provides a window into the shifting political and cultural meanings of crime and immorality at home, but also how illuminates “Germany” in all its guises has navigated its relationship – through commerce, law and migration – to the rest of the world.

Ned Richardson-Little is a Research Fellow in Department V: Globalizations in a Divided World at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam (ZZF). He was previously a Freigeist Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Erfurt leading the Volkswagen Stiftung-funded research group “The Other Global Germany: Deviant Globalization and Transnational Criminality in the 20th Century,” and is currently a PI of the VW Stiftung-funded project “Towards Illiberal
Constitutionalism in East Central Europe: Historical Analysis in Comparative and Transnational Perspectives.” He is the author of The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and The German Democratic Republic: The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State (Bloomsbury, 2025).

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