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More About This Textbook
Overview
This innovative book argues that documents such as passports, internal passports and related mechanisms have been crucial in making distinctions between citizens and noncitizens. It explains how the concept of citizenship has been used over the past 200 years to delineate rights and penalties regarding property, liberty, taxes and welfare. Focusing on the United States and Western Europe, it combines theory and empirical data in questioning how and why states have established the exclusive right to authorize and regulate the movement of people.
Editorial Reviews
Library Journal
No abstract sociological text, this work is notable for its absence of jargon and its solid grounding in historical fact. Torpey (sociology, Univ. of California, Irvine) analyzes how increasingly powerful states wrested from private institutions the power to regulate the movement of citizens across international--and sometimes internal--frontiers. Passports and identification papers played a pivotal role in this extension of state authority. Their newfound control over citizens enabled governments to extract resources from society with unprecedented efficiency. For instance, accurate identification papers helped French revolutionaries to mobilize their nation for protracted war in the 1790s. By distinguishing citizen from foreigner, identification papers evolved into a bureaucratic expression of nationality. Torpey sounds a cautionary note by pointing out that civil liberties inevitably clash with the state's efforts to "embrace" the citizenry more tightly. Although this book may have minimal appeal beyond academic circles, it would be a worthy addition to academic library collections.--James Holmes, Fletcher Sch. of Law & Diplomacy, Tufts Univ., Medford, MA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Product Details
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Table of Contents
Preface; 1. Coming and going: on the state monopolization of the legitimate 'means of movement'; 2. 'Argus of the Patrie': the passport question in the French Revolution; 3. Sweeping out Augias' stable: the nineteenth-century conquest of freedom of movement; 4. Towards the 'Crustacean Type of Nation': the proliferation of identification documents from the late nineteenth-century to the First World War; 5. From national to postnational?: passports and constraints on movement from the Interwar to the Postwar era; Epilogue: a typology of 'papers'.