Younger Than the Railway

Ask most people how old the passport is and they will guess wrong, and they will all guess in the same direction: older. It feels ancient. It is the sort of object that ought to have a long history, and in a thin sense it does; letters asking a governor to let the bearer pass safely are as old as writing about travel. But the thing in your bag, the small book with a photograph and a number, standardized so that an official in a country you have never visited can read it, is younger than the railway.

For most of the nineteenth century, an ordinary traveler in Europe was not asked for one. Passport rules existed on paper in several states, but they were quietly abandoned, one after another, as the trains got faster. The reason was practical rather than generous: when a hundred people step off a train at once, checking a hundred documents by hand is not possible, and the police had no way to do it. By the 1870s a person could travel from Paris to Vienna and back and never be asked who they were. Goods were another matter — you might still have to declare what was in your trunk at customs, and duty was collected at the border — but the traveler was, in the modern sense, unchecked.

The war ended that. From 1914, governments across Europe brought controls back, and for the reason that always produces documents: they wanted to know who was crossing, and to keep out the ones they did not want. Britain issued its first modern passport, with a photograph, in 1915. The measure was described as temporary, and everyone involved appears to have believed it.

They were wrong, but not at once. Because the new documents came in every shape and language, an international conference was held in Paris in 1920 to agree on a common form: a booklet of a standard size, printed in more than one language, valid for a set period. Passports have looked more or less like that ever since. Later meetings in the 1920s discussed how the whole system might be got rid of again, and the discussion went nowhere; by then the passport was doing far too much work for any government to give it up. Immigration control, visa rules, the entire structure of who may enter a country and who may not, now rested on it.

So the document that feels older than the country that issues it is younger than the railway, younger than the telephone, and roughly as old as commercial flight. Until 1914 it was, for most people in Europe, an irrelevance. The temporary measure has now outlived the world that made it by more than a hundred years, which is the ordinary fate of temporary measures.