Identification Documents and the Governance of Mobilities in, through and beyond Seventeenth-Century London

This thesis examines the documentary processes used to identify people who were mobile into, out of, through and beyond seventeenth-century London. It develops the category of ‘identification documents’ to examine documents which were used by authorities to identify and thereby govern mobile people and their movements. This thesis examines these texts not merely as sources of information regarding seventeenth-century mobilities, but rather as functional documents produced and used by a variety of actors. Over the course of four chapters, this thesis examines how authorities in London used documents to surveil a broad range of patterns of movements: movements within England; movements from northwestern Europe to London; movements out of England to northwestern Europe; and movements out of London to English America. In doing so, this thesis demonstrates that the seventeenth century witnessed the development of a variety of different forms of document which were used to monitor and control a wide range of mobilities.

In the seventeenth century, the identification of mobile people developed as a key logic and mechanism of governance deployed by a variety of different authorities in London in their efforts to govern movement and mobile people. This logic of governance was fundamentally structured by patriarchy. These processes of identification developed into a central aspect of how mobile people interacted with authorities in seventeenth-century London. These interactions were crucially shaped by gender and thus led to important gendered divergences in how men and women experienced both migration and authority. This thesis demonstrates that the development of processes in which authorities monitor and control movement, including transnational movement, is not a recent phenomenon, but rather developed in early modernity as a product of the relationship between heightened levels of mobility and authorities’ efforts to govern and surveil these mobilities by producing, using and storing documents.