From the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, British espionage fiction documents relations between the UK and its European neighbours. In many countries, spying was conducted under the auspices of the Foreign Office, albeit at arm’s length. From the 1920s until 1968, British spies often worked in Passport Control Offices, which were attached to consulates in Europe and around the world. These spies, however, did not hold diplomatic status. In novels such as The Riddle of the Sands (1903), The Secret Agent (1907), The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), A Small Town in Germany (1968), and A Perfect Spy (1986), amateur and professional spies take diplomatic cover or work in tandem with government officials. More often than not, early spy fiction presumes that European interests are inimical to British sovereignty and security. In The Riddle of the Sands, Germans plan to invade England. In The Thirty-Nine Steps, continental Europeans foment an assassination plot against the Greek Prime Minister to instigate a war. Although Cold War alignments and membership in the European Union change this dynamic, Britons remain suspicious of European motives. In this regard, British spy fiction asks the same question in different historical contexts: in what ways are Britons European, or not?

I explore the role of identity documents, including forgeries, in this chapter. I analyze the gendered social meanings attributed to passports, as well as the strategies of underage female migrants – the primary targets of the anti-trafficking crusade – in response to state surveillance. Young women were savvy actors in procuring and using forged papers. They stole or borrowed the birth certificates of older sisters, friends, and acquaintances to apply for passports, and they lied, often convincingly, to border control agents about their identity, profession, and final destination. This chapter also shows how the gendered identity of migrants and class-based notions of sexual respectability determined access to the passport, and how age- and gender-based restrictions on mobility prompted some women to resort to forgeries.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

The German emigrant nation proved strikingly resilient despite the Allies’ global efforts to undermine it. The leadership in many of those states confused the presence of Germans all over the world with a German presence somehow beholden to and shaped by the German nation-state.That was their great miscalculation.The demise of Imperial Germany did not dramatically undermine these communities or undercut their soft forms of power because neither had been Imperial Germany’s creations.As a result, Germans quickly returned to being the United States’ greatest rivals in Latin America and their businesses and communities again were flourishing by the middle of the 1920s.At the same time, however, the creation of German minorities across central and eastern Europe mattered a great deal; contributing to the rise of virulent ethno-nationalism, particularly among a younger generation.Within those new contexts, the global flows of people were now channeled and shaped by ever-more stringent immigration laws in the United States and elsewhere as well as ever-more political refugees from the USSR and the nationalizing Central and Eastern European states.

This chapter concentrates on the early months of the war, and delving into autobiographical testimonies looks more closely at the suffering and fate of enemy aliens. The chapter then describes the implementation of the policies adopted in the early months and deals with expulsion, forced repatriation and deportation. It then addresses the internment of civilians, which was one of the major novelties that the belligerent countries introduced in the European war. The chapter follows the spread of concentration camps throughout Europe and the British and French Empires, the internment gender and generational dimensions, and the beginning of the humanitarian activities that the mass internment of enemy aliens triggered. The third part of the chapter deals with another crucial novelty that concerned the property rights of the enemy aliens. States at war sequestered and confiscated their assets as part and parcel of the economic war they waged. The internment and sequestration of enemy property led to enormous growth in the apparatuses of the state. And this meant that state involvement in the lives of civilians increased disproportionately.

Hundreds of foreign whaling ships stopped in newly opened Japanese treaty ports between 1855 and the overthrow of the Tokugawa regime in 1868, particularly in the northern harbor of Hakodate. These vessels not only reprovisioned there but also trained the first generation of Japanese sailors in pelagic whaling techniques. Those men, the recipients of northern Japan’s first passports, not only embodied the first permitted travelers overseas but also later launched deep sea fishing initiatives as Japan transitioned from an Asian to a Pacific nation. This chapter traces that trajectory through whaling ships’ logs and records of the Hakodate Magistrate’s office, placing trans-Pacific documents in conversation to explore how maritime activities in the island of Hokkaido connected Restoration era Japan to global flows of human movement.

This chapter investigates the governance of a diverse city over time, with a special emphasis on those institutions which interfaced between the imperial representatives and the local elites. In the Ottoman reform period, these consisted primarily of an array of different consultative councils at various levels (municipal and provincial). Notably under Saudi rule, these were slowly integrated into the emerging new Kingdom, accompanied by a gradual change in the urban elites controlling the city. The chapter also investigates the implementation of law and order. Finally, it tackles attempts to regulate immigration from Ottoman times to the early Saudi nationality law, and the different rationales behind attempts to limit or rather circumscribe the presence of foreigners. Policies were driven, in Ottoman times, by fears of imperial intervention and attempts at poverty limitation, while, in the Saudi period, an initially liberal approach to nationality soon gave way to more exclusive considerations.