Passports, Borders, and Papers

[Plotinus]

Here's something I've always wondered but never been able to find out.

When did the modern system of national borders, immigration rules, and passports come about?

I know there was a time when people lived just anywhere they felt like it. When St Anselm moved from Italy to France, and later to England, he didn't need to take his passport with him. He encountered no customs officials at the borders. And none of the governments of the various countries he passed through had rules concerning who could enter the country or how long they could stay. The Middle Ages was a time when the nation states we know and love today came into being, and there was fierce nationalism in many quarters, but there were no migration checks and balances. I'm pretty sure that this must have remained the case for some considerable time afterwards. When French Huguenots streamed into England in the seventeenth century, did they need passports? It seems to me unlikely. And while the British public at large did their usual thing and complained vociferously about nasty foreigners coming into the country, and patriotically beat up a good few of them, they couldn't appeal to immigration quotas as their thuggish descendants today do.

Yet now, of course, things are completely different. Not only do we all have passports that are internationally recognised and essential for any kind of travel, but every country has strict and often incomprehensibly complicated rules about who may live there, under what circumstances, and for how long. How did this system evolve? Did it emerge at different times in different places? Who issued the first passport, and to whom? When did people first get the idea that having lots of people migrating into their country was a bad thing, rather than an invaluable source of labour and money, as it was in the late Middle Ages? Why did governments begin legislating to limit it?

Any ideas?

 

[Verbose]

WWI.

Or thereabouts. Really. Passports and efficient border controll are fairly recent things.

Just look at the permeability of borders during wartime in history. In the 18th c. Gibbon could perfectly well travel the roads of France while his England was at war with it, or rather the king of England was at war with the king of France. It really had nothing to do with a private gentleman like Gibbon.

It gets more complicated as soon as French Revolution style nationalism takes hold. It's a prerequisite for considering private individuals as implicated in any conflict between nations as political entities.

But at the same time someone like Napoleon, who relied on general mobilisation and the new sense of national purpose among the French, when trying to blockade England was still almost powerless to stop large scale smuggling between France and England. 100 years later that was a trick, effectively controlling who was passing your borders, even minor European nations could do to perfection.

But still in the late 19th century anyone in an elevated social position enough to have business travelling abroad just did so. There was never any discussion of passports or visa.
Same applied for common folk. All those millions of European immigrants to the US weren't really bothered with more paperwork than buying the ticket — none to leave Sweden, as 1,5 million did, despite worried noises from the govt. over this human drainage — none to enter England from where they would head for the US — and none to enter the US in the end. (The US exception is the exclusion of all Chinese and Asians beginning already in the 1880's. And like everyone else the isolationist US in the 1920's got very picky about which imigrants it would accept.)

If you were politically important enough to get noticed as an individual in the 19th c., there would be personal exceptions for people having made themselves unpalatable to government, and forced into exile (raving liberal German biologist Carl Vogt, forced to go into exile in Switzerland after the aborted 1848 revolution for example, or the Finnish geologist baron A. E. Nordenskiöld, circumnavigator of Asia in 1878, who got on the bad side of his Imperial Majesty's govt. in Helsinki over independance and jumped ship to Stockholm). But that was personal, and as long as you didn't end up on the bad side of the powers that be, at least within Europe you moved around as you pleased.

You get exceptions of course, but mostly within colonial situations:
Already imperial Rome kept a very close watch on who was allowed to enter Egypt for instance. It took special imperial permission to get you into that part of the empire as a Roman citizen. Egypt was considered of such strategic importance for supplying Rome you couldn't risk having someone trying to start ar rebellion there it seems.

And later there's the example of the closed lid Madrid kept on its colonies in the New World. No one got in without Madrid's explicit permission. One of the travelling disciples of the Swedish botanist Linnaeus, sent out to bring Spain and South America into the fold of this global project of biological classfication the Swedes had going in the 18th c., had to spend years in Madrid waiting to obtain clearence to go over to the New World.

And it was a major scientific event when the natural historians Alexander von Humboldt and Aimée Bonpland finally got permission to range the Spanish colonies freely just around the turn of the century 1800. And that was purely because the Spanish crown had begun to realise that they needed help to work out how to best exploit the still relatively untapped resources of that continent. Or just hold on to them, having recently put down some pretty serious rebellions.

So the real business of passports and visa only kicked in after WWI, when the victorious French and British decided to try to put entire nations, including all its citizens, like Germany, Austria and the Soviet Union, in the freezer. They even embargoed all German science in the 1920's (which is kind of dumb if you're doing something like theoretical physics; cutting Einstein and Heisenberg out of the loop isn't advisable if you wish to make progress).

Come to think of it, the best examples of efficient controll of borders prior to the 19th c. comes from Japan and China. Both these nations were quite able to monitor the comings and goings of people in the 17th and 18th c., controlling and restricting in particular European access efficiently. But then again both the Qing and Tokugawa administrations at the time were a damn sight more efficient than most of their European counterparts.

 

[Plotinus]

Thanks for that very helpful answer!

 

[AxiomUk]

In the case of Britain, you can also see it as a neccessity regarding social security payments and whatnot. National Insurance amongst other things.

 

[Verbose]

In the case of Britain, you can also see it as a neccessity regarding social security payments and whatnot. National Insurance amongst other things.

But the thing here is not controlling your own population, but foreigners moving about. It's much easier to find examples of European nations keeping tabs on its own population earlier than monitoring the comings and goings of foreigners and imigrants.

Religion was part of this. The link-up between state and church could be used to allow secular power access to it's own population through the task of making sure they were sufficienly religiously orthodox. I'm thinking of things like the Spanish Inquisition as a national institution, or the way Swedish Protestant orthodoxy required all Swedes to pass a yearly examination, based upon adherence to household, to make sure they weren't straying religiously. (It also required all Swedes to be able to read.)

OTOH if travelling as long as you weren't exposing your heretical ideas you were fine, at least after the implementation of the principles of sovereignity on the 1648 peace of Westphalia.

Considering imigration as a non-issue could also be a part of mercantilism. You really need Malthus to tell you that there could evenbe such a thing as too many people around. Prior to that the overriding problem was always to find enough people, and national wealth was calculated by the number of heads within mercantilism. Add to that the fact that the King of France (or wherever) in no way required his subjects to be all French. Having lots and lots of them was the ticket.

You needed lots too, if you had a bunch of big cities that were real population guzzlers, or a decent colonial project, which is why the need for workers led to institutions otherwise anomalous in Europe like slavery, indentured labour and labour corvées.

 

[YNCS]

They even embargoed all German science in the 1920's (which is kind of dumb if you're doing something like theoretical physics; cutting Einstein and Heisenberg out of the loop isn't advisable if you wish to make progress).

Are you sure about this? In 1919 Arthur Eddington had no difficulty communicating with Einstein concerning the light bending/eclipse experiment.

 

[mrtn]

Who issued the first passport, and to whom?

My mind wants to link this with diplomats...

 

[Verbose]

Are you sure about this? In 1919 Arthur Eddington had no difficulty communicating with Einstein concerning the light bending/eclipse experiment.

Very sure actually.

Edit:
Hopp! A linky.
Not the meatiest imaginable, but the first thing I found (from the EHESS in Paris, abstract in English). The author is bold enough to give exact dates for the boycott of German science (1918-1927). Considering how many holes were picked in it all along I'm a bit less sure about when it could be said to have ended.
http://monderusse.revues.org/document121.html

This boycott didn't outlast the 1920's. And it was exactly theoretical physics and Einstein that showed how nonsensical the idea of a scientific boycott was.

It wasn't maintained for people like Einstein and Heisenberg because you couldn't without shooting yourself in... the head. So it wasn't.

Less glamorous disciplines, and ones where the Germans weren't blowing everyone else's minds, did get put in the freezer for a near decade.

Collegues in the US and the neutral European countries (Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands etc.) acted as proxies, circulated articles and journals, and worked on patching things up. Giving Einstein the Noble Prize after an early form of media campaign in the US was part of these efforts.

And of course the real hard-liners, much more so than the British, were the French. As said, people in academia in the US and other places thought the boycott was a rubbish idea and never participated in the first place.

 

[Plotinus]

Interesting! There may be parallels to the ecumenical movement. Before WWI, there was considerable raprochement between the British and German churches. In fact, they had a major conference planned for August 1914. Of course, during the war, most of the churches turned shamefully patriotic, and that was the end of that (even Quakers queued up to enlist). I don't know when ecumenical relations between the churches were restored. It had certainly been done by the 1930s, because Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a major figure in the ecumenical movement and actually used this position and his contacts in France, Britain, and the US to work for the anti-Nazi resistance within Germany.

 

[7ronin]

Kudos to Plotinus for an excellent question and to Verbose for an equally excellent answer.

 

[YNCS]

Thank you, Verbose. I didn't know about the scientific boycott.