The surprising history of the passport

Editor’s note: This excerpt from essayist and travel writer Shahnaz Habib’s latest book—'Airplane Mode: A Passive-Aggressive History of Travel’—traces the evolution of a ubiquitous document–that was first invented to keep people out—not let them in. This excerpt has been republished with permission of Westland Books.

“France is well in the way of passportism,” says the fifth volume of Chambers’s Pocket Miscellany, a series of essay collections edited by William and Robert Chambers, Edinburgh-based publishers, starting in 1829. This is the earliest reference to passportism I’ve found, and the author is describing how annoying it is to be asked for a passport when he travels outside Britain. In resentful detail, he outlines the suffering of a British man who is detained by a sentinel for smoking a cigar in Prussia and has to spend the night in the guardhouse. 

These words were published in the middle of the nineteenth century, the dawn of modern tourism. It had only been a couple of decades since trains had become a form of public transportation, nine years after the first Thomas Cook expedition. According to Martin Lloyd in ‘The Passport: The History of Man’s Most Travelled Document’, for the upper-class British traveller of this era, a passport was a tiresome document. 

So many countries did not require it, which made it especially annoying that France did. It seems remarkable from my perspective in the first  quarter of the twenty-first century that there was a time when many people travelled abroad without passports. But in the nineteenth century, travellers from wealthy countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom frequently moved through the world undocumented, fully confident that their bearing and social class made a passport unnecessary. Passport officials had a great degree of discretion in choosing to ask to see a passport or not. 

Across the Atlantic, Lloyd notes, the constitutions of Mexico and many South American countries, including Venezuela, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, provided the right to travel freely without a passport to all foreigners. Many guidebooks of the time indicate that while passports were not needed for travel, they could be useful for reclaiming packages at the post office or changing money. 

When it did exist, the nineteenth-century passport was usually a single sheet of paper, tucked into a traveller’s wallet. A single passport could apply to an entire group of travellers, including servants. Sometimes, it described the passport holder; often it did not. Photos were not required until the twentieth century after a German spy impersonated an American during the First World War. 

The passport frequently functioned as a kind of entry permit, more akin to the modern visa, rather than a document of nationality. Passports were issued by a person’s country of nationality but also by other countries—if you lost your passport while travelling abroad (or if you were British and had simply not bothered to get one), you could apply for a passport from the country in which you found yourself. They could be issued by Italian duchies, German kingdoms, and mayors in the United States. 

They were hardly passports as we think of them today. Prior to the nineteenth century, passports were much more commonly used as domestic documents. A commoner in eighteenth-century France had to have either a passport issued by the local town hall or an “aveu,” a character certificate from the local church. The point was to make it difficult for peasants to migrate to cities, especially Paris. Elsewhere in Europe, internal passports were used to control the movements of “gypsies” and “vagabonds.” 

At the turn of the eighteenth century, Lloyd writes, the lowliest Continental agricultural worker who wanted to walk thirty miles down the road had to possess a passport describing him down to the colour of his eyebrows and the shape of his chin. (The much-hated passport system was briefly overthrown in the immediate wake of the French Revolution but was quickly reinstated after it was found useful in preventing the French aristocracy from emigrating to friendly countries with their baubles.) 

And while the upper-class British were affronted by having to acquire passports for travel abroad, a 1662 law in England, adopted by Charles II, empowered the local authorities to remove to their place of legal settlement anyone likely to become a public charge. I have often used the word passport as a metaphor for mobility. But the more I read passport history, the more I realise that preventing mobility is the real ancestry of the modern passport. While it is tempting to look on passports as documents of access, enabling us to move freely through the world, they are, in fact, documents that started out preventing travel, or permitting travel only along state approved itineraries. 

The passport’s ancient origins hint at this state control of private movement. The Old Testament records that the prophet Nehemiah required letters from King Artaxerxes (of modern-day Iraq) to the governors of lands across the Euphrates so he could travel freely through them when he went to Palestine. 

Roman emperors are known to have issued tractoriums to permit their officials to travel throughout the far reaches of the Roman Empire, and, according to the Codex Theodosianus, students who wanted to come to Rome had to first get permission documents from the judges in their local provinces. Passports have also been traced back to the safe-conduct documents issued by medieval kings to soldiers and negotiators of enemy countries. Thus, right from the beginning, the power of a passport to facilitate travel is a corollary to the power of the state to deny passports and prevent travel. 

It was in modern times, however, that the passport as a state tool came into its own. John Torpey writes in The Invention of Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State of how the rise of the modern nation-state is intertwined with its control of mobility. The “stateness” of a state, Torpey writes, stems from its ability to control who travels within and into its borders. The modern nation-state inherited this legacy from mediaeval kingdoms that zealously monitored the movement of the poor and marginalised.