Countries used to worry more about keeping people in than keeping them out. Then came the French Revolution, the nation-state and the need to control citizens

Passports control the movement of migrants Yuri Kozyrev/Noor

Governments only started to control who entered their country relatively recently. Other than in wartime, authorities worried more about people getting out. Roman and medieval laws kept peasants bound to their farms. In the 1600s, English labourers needed locally issued passes to travel for work, partly to stop them “benefits shopping” for parish poor relief. But controls were largely internal.

External passports were mere requests for safe conduct, rather than restrictive documents determining where you could go, says John Torpey at the City University of New York. This was partly because technology to identify individuals, such as photography, was not widely available until the late 19th century.

But the main reason was that an individual’s nationality had little political meaning before the late 1700s. The passport as an instrument of state regulation was born of the French revolution of 1789. At first, ordinary people were issued passes to control internal movement, especially to Paris. But after the king tried to escape, and foreign aristocrats attacked the revolution, the authorities started requiring such papers for exit and entry to the country. The revolution created one of the world’s first “nation-states”, defined by the “national” identity of its people rather than its monarchs’ claims. “This novel importance of the people and their nationality made identity papers integral to creating the modern state,” says Torpey.


As the idea of the nation-state spread, so did passports. But as the industrial revolution snowballed in the 19th century, there was pressure to allow free movement of all the factors of production – money, trade and labour. Passport requirements were widely relaxed across Europe – in 1872, the British foreign secretary, Earl Granville, even wrote: “all foreigners have the unrestricted right of entrance into and residence in this country”. The situation was similar in North America.

In the early 20th century, European legal experts were divided over whether states even had the right to control people’s international movements. But the nationalism that was propelling Europe towards war changed that. Among other things, it meant foreigners might be spies. Passport controls were reapplied, and never lifted again.

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This article appeared in print under the headline “Passport to success?”