Until the early 1970s, UK immigration rules did not include a category of ‘illegal’ immigration. This chapter traces the shift from this largely permissive immigration regime based on the use of caps and criteria, to the more individualised approach based on illegalisation and individual punishment that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It shows how this new, individualised approach was considered by officials and the Labour government as a necessary response to political expectations, rather than a means of better steering migration. The individualised approach also necessitated - and enabled - new forms of state knowledge of irregular migrants. However, a lack of operational commitment to this approach led to relatively lax implementation, and a residual issue of limited state knowledge of unauthorised migrants.

Most accounts of states and knowledge see knowledge as crucial to realising state governing projects and for underpinning the ‘epistemic authority’ of the state. This chapter questions the underlying assumptions these accounts make about state motivation or rationality. Building on theories of state legitimation, it argues that we should see knowledge production as highly selective and contingent. The chapter then elaborates on the three lenses for exploring ignorance: (a) omission, inspired by theories of bounded rationality and information processing; (b) strategy, building on sociological and anthropological notions of strategic ignorance and (c) ascription, building on theories of social movements and focusing on processes of claims-making and political contestation that expose state ignorance.

The Introduction sets the scene for a reassessment of the transformative reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (1485–1547). It addresses recent treatments of this period as the threshold between the late-medieval and early modern worlds, associated only with the growth of monarchical power. As this book reveals, a formalised system for dispensing royal justice emerged under the first two Tudor monarchs. The engagements between sovereign and subjects it facilitated provide insight into how a vulnerable regime was legitimised. Analysis of this point of contact in the following chapters proceeds through three frameworks. First is the administrative-history approach central to mid-twentieth-century scholarship on this period, which this study revives but also revises. Second is the emphasis on litigation to the Crown as a means of state–society cohesion in histories of the Elizabethan and Stuart ages, projected into earlier decades and given greater practical definition in this book. Third is the overlooked presence of contention within royal justice, given full assessment in the present study and crucial to understanding why this jurisdiction was dissolved in 1641.

This chapter explores the asylum crisis of the 1990s. We examine how officials in Germany and the UK dealt with growing evidence of a sizeable population of irregular migrants by deploying the three main strategies for responding to ignorance: denial, elucidation and resignation. Although both governments pursued forms of denial and resignation, these took different forms. In the UK, pragmatism about the limitations of state capacity implied that officials were sanguine about their ‘ignorance’, with pressure emanating from external political scrutiny. In Germany, officials faced an acute conflict between bureaucratic and legal norms of the rule of law. Both cases reveal profound state ambivalence about elucidating a social problem over which they had limited control.

This chapter charts how irregular migration was first identified in France and the UK as a social problem requiring state intervention. Building on theories of information processing, it explores the filters through which each government scanned their political and operational environment to identify and frame the issue. In the UK, a political preoccupation with limiting overall numbers of Commonwealth migrants led to measures to penalise ‘evasion of control’ in the late 1960s. In France, concerns about 'clandestine work' prompted a focus on irregular labour in 1970s, which built on earlier security priorities tied to the Algerian War. By locating the emergence of the issue in historical and cross-national context, our analysis highlights the contingent and selective nature of state knowledge production about irregular migration.

This introductory chapter sets out the core arguments of the book. It introduces the key concepts and theoretical approach, including state rationality, strategies of knowledge production and state ignorance. It then outlines the three lenses for exploring ignorance: ignorance as omission, ignorance as strategy and ignorance as ascription. Finally, it sets the scene for the empirical analysis, introducing the issue of irregular migrants, and explaining the comparative research design that focuses on three case studies: France, Germany and the UK.

The German state is often presented as an archetypal example of a bureaucratised system of migration surveillance and control. The Central Foreigners Register, introduced in West Germany in 1953 and digitised in 1967, is a central pillar of this infrastructure, and one of the most comprehensive tools of migration control in any liberal democratic state. Through analysis of federal and state records, this chapter reconstructs the challenges of coordination and resources that impeded the effective operation of the register in the post-war years. Nevertheless, despite its operational deficiencies, it has played an important symbolic role in bolstering the self-image of Germany as a modern state with a high capacity to control its population.

In our concluding chapter, we review the evolution of state infrastructures of control. Such infrastructures embody state beliefs about how best to steer migrants, and also provide maps with which states ‘see’ their unauthorised populations. We chart changes in infrastructures since the 1960s across three dimensions: styles, sites and temporalities of control. The analysis highlights the continued reliance on centralised command and control approaches in Germany, despite niggling concerns that they are not capturing the full picture. In France, patchy implementation of work and welfare restrictions, and a sharp left-right divide on the issue, has repeatedly led governments back to the tool of regularisation. In the UK, lack of internal control infrastructure has been compensated for by outsourcing to external organisations, meaning that migrants get ‘caught’ at later stages in their lives when they are most reliant on social and economic support. We explore the implications of these different infrastructures on state knowledge and ignorance.

The 1980s and 1990s saw a phase of increasing intergovernmental cooperation between European countries, culminating in Schengen and EU cooperation on immigration. This sharply exposed the divergence of migration control across European countries, triggering both ‘learning effects’ as countries adapted domestic legislation on asylum and borders, and ‘compensatory effects’ to mitigate the loss of internal Schengen border controls. Yet rather than leading to convergence, national systems of internal migration control remained surprisingly enduring. The chapter shows how the persistence of these divergences made arrangements on Schengen and free movement vulnerable to political shocks such as the 2015 refugee crisis and Brexit.

This chapter offers a historical overview of the governance of irregular migration as a key element in the construction of the post-war European state. It explores four moments, each of which represents an evolution of state capacities in relation to the control of (irregular) migration. The first moment is the immediate post-war period, in which large-scale population movement and displacement led to the emergence of a set of legal frameworks that were designed to regulate these social realities at a collective level. The second moment corresponds to the end of the European colonial empires in the 1950s and 1960s, when contests over citizenship, residency and movement rights reshaped the political framework of 'irregularity'. The third moment corresponds to the 'closure' of West European borders in the mid-1970s, after which both regular and irregular migration emerged as a social problem. Finally, the fourth moment runs from the 1990s to the present-day. This period has been characterised by a radicalisation of the politics of immigration, as well as processes of Europeanisation that have sought to monitor individual migrants.

This chapter explores the constitutional ramifications of the French Revolution’s transformation of the old regime of property. It reinterprets the abolition of feudalism as part of the revolutionaries’ larger attempt to draw a conceptual and legal line of demarcation between property and power. Their double aim was to make property truly private by stripping from it all attributes of public authority and to make power truly public by eliminating its former patrimonial characteristics. The attempt to implement this demarcation in practice was still underway decades after the Revolution had formally ended feudalism. Over time, it largely succeeded. From this distinction between property and power flowed some of the key conceptual binaries – the political and social, state and society, public and private, sovereignty and property – through which we still apprehend the world. The abolition of feudalism was thus much more than simply the eradication of an archaic form of property. Rather, it played an essential role in shaping the conceptual building blocks from which modernity was built.

This chapter outlines the theoretical and historical argument of the book by criticizing extant accounts of the origin of the modern international system. It does so be engaging the view according to which the modern international system emerged as a consequence of a transition from a world of empires to a world of states, arguing that this presupposes that empires and states are categorically distinct and can be placed in historical succession. It also engages the view according to which the modern international system spread to other continents as a result of a diffusion of European ideas, instead arguing that this was a result of their creative appropriation.

Chapter 4 deals with the rise of nationalism and pleas for self-determination during the latter half of the nineteenth century and describes some attempts to reconcile these with notions of empire and imperial rule. When the principle of nationality became constitutive of statehood towards the end of that century, this principle was used to justify wars of unification in Europe. But this principle also provided a new and potent justification of colonial rule at a moment when earlier standards of sovereignty and civilization were increasingly contested. Whereas European peoples were deemed ripe for self-government by virtue of constituting homogenous nations, non-European peoples were considered unfit for self-government on the grounds that they lacked the defining characteristics of nationhood and should therefore remain under European tutelage. Yet the idea of nationality was soon appropriated by anticolonial nationalists to debunk empire and imperial rule and to support claims to self-determination of non-European peoples. Although most of those claims were initially unsuccessful, the spread of anticolonial nationalism and the contestations of standards of legitimacy and recognition that ensued made membership of the international system the obvious escape route from imperial domination.

This chapter looks at Andrewes’ political theology, that is to say his vision of divine right monarchy and the absolute powers of the prince over both church and state; notions that are placed in the overarching structures of his theological position. In the process, the populist principles of the Jesuits and the presbyterians are revealed, in Andrewes’ view, equally and equivalently anti-monarchical in their effects. Andrewes held the injunctions to fear God and to fear the king to be equally compelling and mutually reinforcing injunctions: loyalty to the prince being just another facet of faith in and obedience to God.

The Introduction situates the main theoretical framework and contextualises the book amid the institutional landscape of modern-day Germany. It analyses the productive albeit difficult relationship between anthropology and theatre, as well as the crucial intersections and failures to connect ethnography as a method and contemporary performance studies. The introduction outlines the role of theatre as a modern form of self-cultivation in Germany and introduces the book’s key concept of theatre as a scalar ethico-aesthetic tradition. It discusses the unique scope of anthropology to study both micro-level practices of institutionalised traditions, as well as to grasp wider cultural and historic patterns that have shaped the national traditions of German public theatre. The introduction also outlines the ethnographic accounts through which this book unfolds how such an anthropological study of contemporary German theatre renders intelligible the tensions and troubles of a self-proclaimed ‘state of the arts’.

Chapter 1 unfolds the historical context of two central overarching notions in this book’s narrative: the German Kulturstaat and the country’s Bildungsbürgertum. Combining historical analysis with ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin during the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Germany’s largest theatre festival and observations at the city’s iconic Volksbühne, this chapter explores the moral significance attributed to institutionalised public theatres, as well as activist contestations of its state patronage and institutional structures. It also traces the role of cultural politics in facilitating the emergence of public theatres as sites for aesthetic self-cultivation (Bildung) and nation-building in the face of an increasingly diverse contemporary Germany. Expanding on the notion of institutions as traditions in Western contexts, it expands on the necessity for anthropology to take into account cultural history and art history as part of fieldwork.

Summary: In an accepted view, living standards stagnated in India from about 1600 to 1950. Discussing the history of development in South India from pre-colonial times to 1900, this chapter suggests that development trajectories differed by region and ecology. Naturally irrigated areas commercialised early, traded globally and saw an increase in transfers of capital and goods after 1800. Arid areas were buffer zones, housing large military garrisons in the pre-colonial period. Farmers settled in these areas late, and these regions remained poorly developed during colonial rule. Despite investments in railway networks connecting markets across ecological zones, poor land quality remained a persistent barrier to development in large parts of South India.