The volume under review is one of the relatively few edited volumes that the publisher must have been genuinely happy to receive in manuscript. Such volumes are, famously, the bane of publishers’ existence, lying somewhere between a book with a single, distinctive voice and a scholarly journal bringing together a disparate array of papers presumed to have survived the searching scrutiny of knowledgeable reviewers. The edited volume also typically suffers from a certain low regard in the eyes of those who evaluate the academic achievement of their contributors. After all, the individual papers are often seen as less rigorously peer-reviewed than those in scholarly journals because the volumes are frequently compiled by professional colleagues who know each other through their shared scholarly networks, shortening their arm's length.
While all of that may be true, it does not necessarily vitiate the possibility that serious scholarship addressing a common subject from different perspectives can be found within the covers of such a volume. Migration Policies and Materialities of Identification in European Cities demonstrates the point very well. Despite treating a range of specific places and times, the book makes an excellent contribution to our understanding of the variety of ways in which early modern and modern European cities regulated migration during this period. The subtitle of the book, which invokes ‘papers and gates’ (though perhaps in the wrong order), points to one of its chief contributions: the shift from the centrality of physical to that of paper barriers to mobility in the course of the period under consideration. The main title is somewhat misleading, however, in the sense that it refers only to ‘cities’ as agents of identification and migration control when in fact one of the main findings of the volume is that, over time, cities gradually ceded control over movement to larger, more encompassing units – namely, nation-states.
The volume includes a fascinating range of papers: on the regulation of movement in early modern Venice, where the gondoliers that now charm tourists played a gatekeeping role in the system of migrant mobility; on the role of social relationships and hierarchies in facilitating or constraining mobility; on the modalities of movement regulation in Turin, Istanbul, Belgium, Russian imperial cities, Vienna, Budapest, London, Berlin and elsewhere; and, perhaps inevitably, on the Roma, whose resistance to settled life has long unsettled societies that take for granted or even require settledness. One of the important points made by these papers is that it might be innkeepers, landlords, guilds and others, rather than officials, who actually enforced constraints on mobility; the law required those persons to report to the authorities information about those who were under their tutelage, whether just for a night or for longer. This observation also reminds us that a great variety of types of people may be smuggled under the term ‘migrants’ – travelling businesspeople, those in search of temporary work, short-term visitors, those wishing to stay permanently, others seeking alms or religious benediction – to the point that the term may be more unhelpful than these more descriptive alternatives.
What is perhaps most striking about the book are two things: first, the way it advances through time across the various chapters, helping to lend the disparate chapters a common narrative arc; and, second, the way the historian of citizenship and identification documents, Andreas Fahrmeir, weaves together their message in his thoughtful conclusion. Fahrmeir's valedictory shows conclusively that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Surveying the various chapters, he stresses above all the variation within the broader tendencies revealed by the individual studies. Without a doubt, he argues, there is an overarching shift away from physical boundaries and toward paper barriers, but the rate at which these are implemented and the relevant bureaucracies develop varies from one place to the other. He takes up the difficult but important question of whether these technologies of identification and regulation follow a single, linear trajectory, as Weber's theory of rationalization would lead us to expect, or whether they instead betray a more cyclical pattern. Fahrmeir reminds us that the longue durée points to the correctness of Weber's view, but at the same time, it is also true that, contrary to the linear perspective, there were breaks and reversals in the trajectory: European rulers in the second half of the nineteenth century, newly persuaded of the virtues of liberalism, relaxed or eliminated many of the constraints on movement that had previously hampered travellers. Gradually, however, these constraints returned, though they were ‘democratized’, ensnaring everyone – high and low. To be sure, status considerations, which had long differentiated among those free to move and those less free to do so, continued to play a role well into the twentieth century and beyond. Yet the democratization of surveillance advances apace; facial recognition software is uninterested in social status, even if it is not necessarily very good at identifying the faces of certain ethno-racial groups.
Ultimately, the book shows that the trick for those wishing to regulate movement is to identify and keep out the ‘bad guys’, whose characteristics shift across time, while facilitating the movements of the ‘good guys’. This excellent volume shows us how European cities have tried, since 1500, to thread that needle, and how their efforts to do so have changed during the subsequent half-millennium. The book offers exemplary scholarship in a format not always associated with that achievement – the edited volume – and should be of interest to anyone interested in the historical development of migration regulation and the changing role of cities in that process.
