As Adam M. McKeown demonstrates, the push for increased border control
and identity documentation is the continuation of more than 150 years of
globalization. Not only are modern passports and national borders
inseparable from the rise of global mobility, but they are also tied to
the emergence of individuals and nations as the primary sites of global
power and identity.
McKeown's detailed history traces how, rather than being a legacy of
"traditional" forms of sovereignty, practices of border control
historically rose from attempts to control Asian migration around the
Pacific in the 1880s. New policies to control mobility had to be
justified in the context of contemporary liberal ideas of freedom and
mobility, generating principles that are taken for granted today, such
as the belief that migration control is a sovereign right of receiving
nations and that it should occur at a country's borders.
McKeown shows how the enforcement of these border controls required
migrants to be extracted from social networks of identity and
reconstructed as isolated individuals within centralized filing systems.
Methods for excluding Asians from full participation in the "family of
civilized nations" are now the norm between all nations. These practices
also helped institutionalize global cultural and economic divisions,
such as East/West and First and Third World designations, which continue
to shape our understanding.