As Adam M. McKeown demonstrates in this book, our current push for increased border control and identity documentation is a direct consequence of more than 150 years of rapid globalization. Modern passports and national borders not only are inseparable from the rise of global mobility but are also tied to the emergence of individuals and nations as the primary sites of global power and identity.

Adam M. McKeown's detailed history traces how, rather than being a legacy of "traditional" forms of sovereignty, these 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 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 for migration control between all nations. At the same time, these practices helped institutionalize global cultural and economic divisions, including East/West, First and Third World designations, which continue to shape our view of the world.