Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History

This is a comparative investigation of different regional histories of registration - a feature of societies common across Asia, Europe and the Americas, but poorly understood in contemporary social science. Registration has typically been viewed as coercive, and as a product of the rise of the modern European state. This volume shows that the registration of individuals has taken remarkably similar, and interestingly comparable, forms in very different societies across the world. The volume also suggests that registration has many hitherto neglected benefits for individuals, and that modern states have frequently sought to curtail, or avoid responsibility for, it. The book shows that the close study of practices of registration provides a tool - like class, gender or state - that supports analytical comparisons across time and region, raising a common, limited set of comparative questions that highlight the differences between the forms of state power and the responsibilities and entitlements of individuals and families. Available in OSO: Contributors to this volume - Simon Szreter Keith Breckenridge Richard von Glahn Simon Szreter Andreas Fahrmeir Osamu Saito Masahiro Sato Paul-Andre Rosental Rebecca Flemming Tamar Herzog H.D. van Leeuwen Andrew MacDonald Shane Doyle Ravindran Gopinath Stanley L. Engerman Khaled Fahmy Keith Breckenridge Frederick Cooper Anne-Emanuelle Birn Dominique Marshall Francie Lund James Ferguson