Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World

This work addresses one of the least studied yet most pervasive aspects of modern life - the techniques and mechanisms by which official agencies certify individual identity. From passports and identity cards to labour registration and alien documentation, from fingerprinting to much-debated contemporary issues such as DNA-typing, body surveillance, and the catastrophic results of colonial-era identity documentation in postcolonial Rwanda, the book offers a comprehensive historical overview of this topic. The nineteen essays in this volume represent the collaborative effort of historians, sociologists, historians of science, political scientists, economists, and specialists in international relations. Together they cover a period from the emergence of systematic practices of written identification in early modern Europe through to the present day, and a geographic range that includes Europe, the Soviet Union, North and South America, and Africa.While the book is attuned to the nefarious possibilities of states' increasing capacity to identify individuals, it recognizes that these same techniques also certify citizens' eligibility for significant positive rights, such as welfare be

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Jane Caplan and John Torpey 1 PART ONE: CREATING APPARATUSES OF IDENTIFICATION 13 1. Describing the Person, Reading the Signs in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Identity Papers, Veste Figures, and the Limits of Identification, 1400-1600 by Valentin Groebner 15 2. The Identification of the Citizen: The Birth of Republican Civil Status in France by Gerard Noiriel 28 3. "This or That Particular Person": Protocols of Identification in Nineteenth-Century Europe by Jane Caplan 49 4. Making Social Groups, One Person at a Time: The Identification of Individuals by Estate, Religious Confession, an Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russia by Charles Steinwedel 67 5. Colonizing the Subject: The Genealogy an Legacy of the Soviet Internal Passport by Marc Garcelon 83 6. Modern Horrors: British Identity and Identity Cards by Jon Agar 101 PART TWO: IDENTIFICATION RACTICES AND POLICING 121 7. Republican Identity: Bertillonage as Government Technique by Martine Kaluszynski 123 8. The Standardize Gaze: The Standardization of the Search Warrant in Nineteenth-Century Germany by Peter Becker 139 9. Anthropometry, the Police Expert, an the Deptford Murders: The Contested Introduction of Fingerprinting for the Identification of Criminals in Late Victorian an Edwardian Britain by Anne M. Joseph 164 10. Fingerprinting an the Argentine lan for Universal Identification in the Late Nineteenth an Early Twentieth Centuries by Kristin Ruggiero 184 PART THREE: IDENTIFICATION AND CONTROL OF MOVEMENT 197 11. Domenica Saba Takes to the Road: Origins an Development of a Modern Passport System in Lombardy-Veneto by Andrea Geselle 199 12. Governments and Forgers: Passports in Nineteenth-Century Europe by Andreas Fahrmeir 218 13. A Many-Headed Monster: The Evolution of the Passport System in the Netherlands an Germany in the Long Nineteenth Century by Leo Lucassen 235 14. The Great War an the Birth of the Modern Passport System by John Torpey 256 PART FOUR: CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN IDENTIFICATION 271 15. DNA-Typing: Galton's Eugenic Dream Realized? by Pamela Sankar 273 16. Under My Skin: From Identification Papers to Body Surveillance by David Lyon 291 17. Identity an Anonymity: Some Conceptual Distinctions and Issues for Research by Gary T. Marx 311 18. Identifiying Unauthorize Foreign Workers in the German Labor Market by Dita Vogel 328 19. Identity Cards, Ethnic Self-Perception, and Genocide in Rwanda by Timothy Longman 345 Bibliography 359 Notes on Contributors 397 Index 403

About the Author :
Jane Caplan is Marjorie Walter Goodhart Professor of European History at Bryn Mawr College. Her most recent publications include the collections Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History (Princeton) and Nazism, Fascism, and the Working Class: Essays by Tim Mason. John Torpey is Associate Professor of Sociology and European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is the author of The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State and Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent: The East German Opposition and Its Legacy.

Review :
"This collection of essays examines the ways in which official agencies have sought to certify the identities of individuals throughout history, from the development of paper bureaucracy in Renaissance Italy and France and the subsequent invention of national citizenship, to the census and the development of police practices including warrants and fingerprinting. Intriguing points abound."--Steven Poole, The Guardian "The essays are uniformly rigorous, well-written, and fascinating."--Barbara Cruikshank, American Journal of Sociology