Migration Policies and Materialities of Identification in European Cities

Papers and Gates, 1500-1930s

Hilde Greefs, Anne Winter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429786860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book focusses on the instruments, practices, and materialities produced by various authorities to monitor, regulate, and identify migrants in European cities from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Whereas research on migration regulation typically looks at local policies for the early modern period and at state policies for the contemporary period, this book avoids the stalemate of modernity narratives by exploring a long-term genealogy of migration regulation in which cities played a pivotal role. The case studies range from early modern Venice, Stockholm and Constantinople, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century port towns and capital cities such as London and Vienna.

Part I

Introduction

Introduction

Migration Policies and Materialities of Identification in European Cities: Papers and Gates, 1500–1930s

Hilde Greefs and Anne Winter

Introduction

Urban history and the history of migration are intimately intertwined. European cities have always functioned as nodes of capital and resources, supported by the influx of various immigrants. Every city’s ‘golden age’ was marked by high rates of mobility, and the arrival of thousands of newcomers, while periods of contraction were characterized by a downfall in immigration. Whether addressed from a social, cultural, political, or economic perspective, urban history is to a large degree a history of migration and of dealing with migration. Yet, while migration and diversity have always been part and parcel of urban life, the numbers and profiles of newcomers, as well as their reception, varied through space and time. While the needs of cities were never constant, their attractiveness to migrants varied according to local opportunities and spatial connections, but also according to migration policies and regulatory practices. These regulatory practices were in turn shaped by power relationships, cultural and physical constraints, institutional path dependency, and – last but not least – technological possibilities.

Different types and levels of authority have indeed tried to influence, control and monitor migration flows in different times and places. In late medieval and early modern cities, migration flows and patterns of settlement were often regulated by local and sub-local institutions, while the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the growing influence of the nation-state. This book focuses on the instruments, practices, and materialities produced by the efforts of various authorities to regulate and monitor migration flows in European cities from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. Whereas most research on the early modern period focuses on the local level and most studies on the modern period look at the level of the nation-state, this book aims to move beyond the stalemate of modernity narratives by focusing on the practices, spaces, and documents by which migrants were monitored, identified and assigned a place in the urban fabric in a long-term perspective. As such, the approach allows privileged insight into the constraints and possibilities of migration regulation in practice, and into the interaction of policies with migrant experience and agency. In this introductory chapter, we will first provide an overview of the main fields of research to which this book aims to relate, before presenting the main ambitions and scope of the volume and reflecting on some main insights and questions that emerge out of the different case-studies brought together in this book.

Migration Policies from an Urban Perspective

The history of migration regulation has long been undertaken mainly in the context of the history of the nation-state. In this strand of research, migration regulation was considered a by-product of the formation of modern nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the expansion of state intervention in ever more areas of society, from political rights and taxation over social assistance and the regulation of labour markets, fostered a growing need to distinguish between citizens and foreigners (Noiriel, 1991; Brubaker, 1992). Yet, while migration policies at national level gained prominence only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, other strands of historiography have highlighted how other authorities, mainly at the local level, were active in the regulation of migration and settlement for many centuries before the rise of nation-states. Cities were particularly active in this field, and the ways in which urban authorities have tried to attract ‘wanted’ and repel ‘unwanted’ migrants, has become a familiar topos in late medieval and early modern urban historiography (Boes, 2007; Boone, 2009; Cerutti, 2012).

The first field of research to which this book aims to contribute is, therefore, that of migration regulation from an urban perspective. Early studies on preindustrial cities tended to focus on policies towards specific migrant groups with distinct ethnic, religious, occupational or wealth characteristics, such as merchant nations, Jews, Moriscos, Huguenots, and the compagnonnages (eds. Soly and Thijs, 1995; eds. Menjot and Pinol, 1996; eds. Bottin and Calabi, 1999). More recent research on the interaction between migration and specific urban institutions, such as citizenship (ed. Schwinges, 2002), guilds (De Munck, 2007), poor relief (eds. King and Winter, 2013), and policing (eds. Blanc-Chaléard et al., 2001), has helped to bring to the fore how all types of migrants were at times confronted with many-layered repertoires of inclusion and exclusion in the urban community and how the existence of a diversity of urban institutions (see also Clark, 1987) resulted in assigning different positions to distinct types of newcomers. These insights have contributed to the development of a more comprehensive approach to premodern urban migration regulation that aims to identify shifting boundaries between wanted and unwanted migrants in relation to the variety of institutional mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion. The underlying concerns of these institutional mechanisms, moreover, appear to have shown many parallels with those of later migration policies at national level, revolving as they did primarily around the maintenance of political stability, the management of local resources, and the regulation of labour markets (eds. De Munck and Winter, 2012).

While research on migration regulation in the late medieval and early modern period has therefore moved towards identifying a longer-term urban genealogy of ‘modern’ migration policies, recent research on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has also increasingly highlighted the crucial role of cities in the development of ‘national’ migration policies in this period. While early research studied the emergence of ‘modern’ migration policy as a top-down process originating with the state and national actors, recent research on the nineteenth century has grown more attentive to the ways in which lower and especially urban authorities played a role in implementing and influencing these policies (Noiriel, 1991; Leenders, 1993; Lucassen, 1995; Debackere, 2016). Although the political reorganization of nation-states implied that cities lost much of their formal powers to regulate migration autonomously, they nevertheless continued to influence migration policies in many ways (Fahrmeir et al., 2003; Lucassen, 2012). While national regulations could be adapted or implemented selectively on the local level, urban authorities also developed new ways of dealing with dynamics of urban migration, for instance with regard to housing, education, or social assistance. Especially in the domain of poor relief and social assistance, urban authorities remained influential, since the organization of welfare remained an essentially local responsibility well into the twentieth century (Feldman, 2003; eds. King and Winter, 2013). Furthermore, to identify, monitor and register the movements of people, national authorities necessarily relied on the co-operation of local – especially urban – authorities (Coppens and Debackere, 2015). Already before the rise of nation-states, moreover, local authorities were seldom completely autonomous in their dealings with migrants, as regional or central authorities could and did interfere, while dynamics of reciprocity or the interference of powerful associations such as merchant nations also restricted the autonomy of municipal organizations in dealing with migrants (eds. De Munck and Winter, 2012).

Migration regulation both at the national and urban level was strongly influenced by changes in the intensity and characteristics of migration and mobility over time. Research from the past decades has amply illustrated that migration to cities was of great demographic and economic importance already in the early modern period (Clark, 1972; Moch, 2003), whence urban growth was essentially determined by immigration (De Vries, 1984; Lees and Lees, 2007). Because most migrants were engaged in temporary, circular, and seasonal migration trajectories, the total number of people migrating to cities was even larger than their net contribution to urban growth suggests (Lucassen and Lucassen, 2009). Short-distance and regional migration patterns were dominant, while important social differences existed between regional and long-distance migrants (Clark, 1972; Winter, 2013). Europe’s strong demographic growth in the nineteenth century interacted with processes of proletarianization and industrialization to increase mobility rates, culminating in a marked growth of urban migration (Lucassen and Lucassen, 2009). While migration costs decreased, and migration rates intensified, long-distance migration democratized – in the sense that also lower-class migrants increasingly moved over longer distances, partly as a consequence of major improvements in means of transport and communication by railroads and steamships (eds. Hoerder and Kaur, 2013).

While city gates and walls served as boundaries between locals and newcomers in the early modern period, national borders became the most important demarcation line in the modern era. This implied that migration policies became increasingly oriented towards migrants born beyond national rather than urban boundaries. The demolition of city gates and walls in most European cities in the nineteenth century offers a material illustration of the changes in governance that took place. However, not only walls and gates but also identification and registration documents were used by both local and national authorities to deal with growing mobility and to delineate between citizens and newcomers, and here important continuities can be observed. This documentary aspect of migration regulation and control is a second major strand of research to which this book wants to contribute.

Materialities and Practices of Identification and Registration

The ambition of this volume is to contribute to the developing understanding of the long-term genealogy of urban migration regulation from the specific perspective of the practices and materialities produced by efforts to regulate and identify migrants. The focus on materialities is much indebted to Foucault’s concept of governmentality, that stresses how studying the techniques and practices of control helps to gain insight into how power is exercised, reproduced and transformed (Foucault, 1991; Gordon, 1991; Gunn, 2006). This concept has been instrumental in understanding how the apparatuses of power embodied by these practices contributed to the changing nature of government into a modern administrative state with complex bureaucracies. A central idea is how the rationality of governance changed over time from princes ruling over subjects inhabiting a territory to states governing abstract populations. The state’s limited capacity to know was translated into a growing ambition to assemble knowledge about its population and to develop expertise and technological know-how to do so (Foucault, 1991). Building on this and related concepts, urban historians have shown that this was a very material process which simultaneously transformed people’s personhood and self-understanding. The emergence of the nineteenth-century liberal state in Western Europe implied the formation of self-governing individuals, which in turn involved transformations in the very materiality of the cities – from the introduction of boulevards and sewers, effecting circulation in a city, up to the spread of plate glass and light switches, transforming social monitoring and the self-perception and self-regulation of individuals and groups. In Chris Otter’s rendering, this is part of the development of a ‘technological state’ which increasingly enabled a type of indirect rule or ruling from a distance (Joyce, 2003; Otter, 2008). Examining this implies an in-depth focus on the microphysics of power materializing in the contextualized practices of policymakers, experts, and ordinary people.

The focus on technologies, materialities, and practices and the underlying concept of governmentality in turn tie in with a very recent field of research: the history of identification and registration practices. As with the history of migration policies, the first studies in this field were very much influenced by the idea that practices of registration and identification were intimately connected to the ambitions of the modern nation-state, which explains why they primarily focused on the development of passports and population registration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Torpey, 2000; eds. Caplan and Torpey, 2001). While considering the French revolutionary period as the formative period of ‘modern’ documentary practices, they interpreted these practices primarily as instruments of top-down control of the growing administrative apparatus of the nation-state. In creating a new relation between the state and its citizens (Prak, 1997; Fahrmeir, 2007), the development of national citizenship from the French Revolution onwards provided an important incentive for the state to improve systems of tracking, and verifying individual identities (eds. Caplan and Torpey, 2001; Fahrmeir, 2007; ed. Noiriel, 2007). Every citizen had to be made visible to the state via systems of registration, classification, and bureaucratization (Scott, 1998). Identities had to be codified and institutionalized. Passports, identity cards, or other identification papers were used to achieve these goals. Registration practices became vehicles for recognition and instruments to define the rights – such as access to work or entitlement to poor relief – and duties – such as military service or paying taxes – associated with state citizenship (Szreter and Breckenridge, 2012). Conventions and technological improvements in identification practices, such as the use of the family name, description of physical traits, portraits, or fingerprints, helped the state to identify its population, while the establishment of specialized departments to deal with registration were necessary to organize, implement and monitor national policies.

Passports and identity cards as government-issued documents were not only instruments of recognition, but also of control and surveillance. They targeted not only the state’s own citizens but also people entering, crossing, or settling into the national territory (Fahrmeir, 2001). As such, they also functioned as material devices to shun unwelcome newcomers (Caestecker, 2000; Reinecke, 2009). The distinction between citizens and newcomers urged the state to track movements, to create documents and to install documentary controls, in order to increase the state’s power to govern. The legal registration and documentary practices in turn also established the identity of immigrants (Torpey, 2000). With the shift from urban gates to national borders and from papers proving local belonging to markers of a national civil identity, another definition of ‘foreigner’ came in use, no longer referring to those from beyond the city gates, but to ‘non-national’ newcomers in particular. The distinction between mobility and migration within and outside the country became more important and was reflected in other identification and registration practices (for instance Geselle, 2001). Systems of identification and registration were crucial in societies not only expanding in size and complexity but also recording increasing levels of mobility and migration. Like in other domains of migration policy, these identification mechanisms and controls were limited, which raises questions about the efficiency and effectiveness of the registration power of the state (Fahrmeir, 2012; Rosental, 2012).

More recently, a broader scope has opened up this predominantly national framework, resulting in two important qualifications. First, a number of publications have highlighted a longer-term genealogy of efforts of registration and identification. Ground-breaking in this respect was Valentin Groebner’s work on identification practices since the Middle Ages, emphasizing how next to images, clothes, seals, or bodily signs, also papers and identification documents such as sauf conduits, letters of introduction, and passports were used for travelling and identification purposes in preindustrial Europe (Groebner, 2007; see also Judde de Larivière, 2007). At the same time, some scholars have projected administrative ambitions back to ancien régime states (Higgs, 2004; Denis, 2008), by highlighting how information was gathered by central authorities long before the rise of the modern state in a context of changing interactions between different levels of governance. Others have stressed the role of urban practices of registration and identification in the late medieval and early modern period in particular, also highlighting their interaction with other local institutions such as religious communities, parishes, and civic associations as ‘non-state registering bodies’ (Looijesteijn and Van Leeuwen, 2012; Szreter, 2012; Szrerter and Breckenridge, 2012). In this line of research, registration and identification have become part of a long history in which different levels of authority, not in the least urban governments, used new technologies of writing and printing to ‘see’, identify and order their populations from the late Middle Ages onwards.

Second, several scholars have subverted the idea of registration and identification as essentially repressive, disciplinary, top-down practices instrumental to the growth of state power, by highlighting the ways in which these identification practices could also lead to forms of entitlement and claims-making, and more generally by stressing how they were also supported, stimulated, used and misused by people to their own ends. Papers became purveyors of identity and could be used as tools for recognition, emancipation, and protection against the arbitrary power of authorities, or to claim entitlement to support or access to social services, labour markets, or political participation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Early Modern Period
• Part III Modern Period
• Part IV Conclusion
• List of Contributors
• Index