Identifying the English: A History of Personal Identification 1500 to the Present

(Hardback)

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Personal identification is very much a live political issue in Britain and this book looks at why this is the case, and why, paradoxically, the theft of identity has become ever more common as the means of identification have multiplied. Identifying the English looks not only at how criminals have been identified - branding, fingerprinting, DNA - but also at the identification of the individual with seals and signatures, of the citizen by means of passports and ID cards, and of the corpse. Beginning his history in the medieval period, Edward Higgs reveals how it was not the Industrial Revolution that brought the most radical changes in identification techniques, as many have assumed, but rather the changing nature of the State and commerce, and their relationship with citizens and customers. In the twentieth century the very different historical techniques have converged on the holding of information on databases, and increasingly on biometrics, and the multiplication of these external databases outside the control of individuals has continued to undermine personal identity security.

Reviews

Mentioned in the 'out now' section in The Times.
Edward Higgs's entertaining, broad-ranging and thought-provoking book looks at the ways and means of establishing personal identity in England from the late medieval period up to the present day... [this is] an intelligent and ambitious book which offers a refreshingly optimistic conclusion. -- History Magazine, Vol. 13, No.1
... [an] eye-opening book... well-researched, full of intriguing facts and compelling arguments, Identifying the English reveals how the supposedly great things about postmodern British democracy- conspicuous consumption, extemsive social welfare, free markets, the free movement of people- are all ultimately dependent on the identification and surveillance of individuals. -- The Literary Review
... this is an engaging, accessible and stimulating overview of personal identification between 1500 and the present day. -- Peter Kitson, University of Cambridge * Local Population Studies, No. 88, Spring 2012 *

Author Bio

Edward Higgs is Professor of History at the University of Essex, UK. He was a senior research fellow at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine of the University of Oxford, 1993-1996, and a lecturer at the University of Exeter from 1996 to 2000. His early published work was on Victorian domestic service, although he has written widely on the history of censuses and surveys, civil registration, women's work, the impact of the digital revolution on archives, the information state, and the history of identification.