The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State

Description

This book presents the first detailed history of the modern passport and why it became so important for controlling movement in the modern world. It explores the history of passport laws, the parliamentary debates about those laws, and the social responses to their implementation. The author argues that modern nation-states and the international state system have 'monopolized the 'legitimate means of movement',' rendering persons dependent on states' authority to move about - especially, though not exclusively, across international boundaries. This new edition reviews other scholarship, much of which was stimulated by the first edition, addressing the place of identification documents in contemporary life. It also updates the story of passport regulations from the publication of the first edition, which appeared just before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, to the present day.

John C. Torpey is Presidential Professor of Sociology and History and the Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Before coming to the Graduate Center, he was an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Previously he was an Assistant Professor and the Chair of the International Studies Faculty Board at the University of California, Irvine. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the German Marshall Fund, the European University Institute (Florence), and the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, Massachusetts. His other publications include Intellectuals, Socialism and Dissent: The East German Opposition and its Legacy (1995), Documenting Individual Identity (2001, coedited with Jane Caplan), Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (2006), Transformations of Warfare in the Modern World (2016, coedited with David Jacobson), and The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental (2017), as well as numerous articles in such journals as Theory and Society, Journal of Modern History, Sociological Theory, and Geneses: Sciences sociales et histoire. In 2016-2017, he was President of the Eastern Sociological Society.