Identification and Registration Practices in Transnational Perspective ― People, Papers and Practices

Utilising sources that range from 16th century parish registers to the 21st century supermarket loyalty card, this collection examines the history and development of identification documents and surveillance techniques over the past 500 years. Combining the knowledge of several experts from a variety of disciplines, this volume successfully demonstrates how identification and registration can enable and empower a population, particularly if the interests of the state and population coincide. It also reveals the weakness of states or corporations when dealing with issues such as popular resistance and fraud, despite great leaps forward in the scientific methods of identifying individuals. This important book offers a vital contribution to the literature on a variety of topical subject areas such as biometric identification, immigration control and personal data use, as such it is of interest to students and scholars of civil and human rights amongst other disciplines.

Ilsen About is Post-doctoral Researcher at the Aix-Marseille University, France and Research Fellow at the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. His most recent publication, co-authored with Vincent Denis, is Histoire de l'identification des personnes (La Decouverte, 2010). He is currently writing a book on the Science of Police Identification in Europe between 1900 and 1930.

James Brown is Project Coordinator for Cultures of Knowledge, a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project based at the University of Oxford, UK with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Prior to this he was the Network Facilitator for the Identinet project, a Leverhulme funded project on the global history of identification.

Gayle Lonergan is a Research Felllow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, UK. She is the author of numerous articles on the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) and is currently working on a history of censuses and civil status in Bulgaria.