Japan’s Civil Registration Systems Before and After the Meiji Restoration

This chapter traces the evolution of Japan's systems of household and land registration from c.1600 to the period of early Meiji reforms in the 1870s and 1880s, with due attention to the distinction between a system designed by the state and local forms of registration practice. In the section on the pre-Meiji period, one such local practice of having people ‘disowned’ and its consequence — registerlessness — is examined. The section on the Meiji reforms and the section that follows turn to the issue of continuity and discontinuity, and the question of whether any progress was made by those reforms. In order to illustrate the actual changes that took place at the local level, the chapter begins with an eighteenth-century story about a peasant woman and ends with a case of a family dispute that another village woman brought before the court some 120 years later.

No Will to Know: The Rise and Fall of African Civil Registration in Twentieth-Century South Africa

Vital statistics have been politically fraught in South Africa for decades, not least because the state made very little effort to record information about the well-being of African women and children. This chapter shows that in the last years of the nineteenth century a working system of vital registration was developed in the colony of Natal and in the native reserves of the Transkei. From the beginning this delegated bureaucracy faced opposition from African patriarchs, from parsimonious white elected leaders and from the advocates of coercive systems of biometric identification. In the early 1920s, under the weight of mostly unfounded accusations of corruption, the system of registration by means of ‘native agency’ was deliberately terminated, despite the general enthusiasm of the magistrates charged with maintaining it.

Civil Status and Identification in Nineteenth-Century France: A Matter of State Control?

Civil status, and particularly birth certificates, rather than identity papers, are the legal basis of identification in France. Its nineteenth-century history presents a complex picture, which cannot be reduced to a process of increasing state control. Far from implementing ambitious registration projects, French liberal administration left information scattered and scarce as compared to European standards. It had to find a balance between the need to provide open information in order to minimize uncertainty in social and economic relationships, and the protection of personal and family honour and reputation. Citizens' agency and consent have been determinant in this process, whose traces are still visible in contemporary France.

Children, Citizenship and Child Support: The Child Support Grant in Post-Apartheid South Africa

In April 1998, the post-apartheid South African government introduced a monthly cash transfer for children in poor households. A requirement for getting the grant was that the birth of the child had to be registered, and the adult primary caregiver had to have the citizen identity document. The success of the system of support was contingent on the new democratic government's ability to integrate into one national welfare system what had been fragmented under apartheid into many racially separated systems; it also, ironically, built on the apartheid-era state pension delivery system. Within a decade the grant reached more than ten million children, and was associated with a rapid increase in birth registrations, marking the poorest children's first step into citizenship, and opening up the possibility of later access to other programmes and entitlements.

Birth Registration and the Promotion of Children’s Rights in the Interwar Years

The right of children to be registered at birth was not part of early universal declarations of entitlements for the young adopted in the wake of the First World War. But during the interwar years, the main proponents of these declarations — the Save the Children International Union and the American Child Health Association, headed by philanthropist and future President Herbert Hoover — soon understood that the registration of infants was at the basis of their work, especially that concerned with the reduction of infant mortality. This chapter studies their respective campaigns in Africa and in the United States, respectively, to show how registration came to be understood as a prerequisite for the full promises of children's rights to be realized. It draws surprising parallels between the two efforts, related to the size of the territory and the discrimination faced by children due to their race and their ethnic origins.

Registration of Identities in Early Modern English Parishes and amongst the English Overseas

From 1538 the new Protestant church of Henry VIII provided a system of registration of baptisms, marriages, and burials in all parishes of England and Wales. This chapter re-examines the original motives behind the creation of this system, and explores the reasons for its effectiveness and persistence over the ensuing three centuries in Britain by surveying the comparative history of identity registration systems among the British overseas in the early modern period. A review of the variety of measures for registration set up in the North American and Caribbean colonies during the course of the seventeenth century confirms the importance of the security of property-holding in an increasingly commercial world as a motive for creating such systems. However, this review also indicates the importance of whether or not effective social security systems, giving entitlements to relief, accompanied these early identity registration schemes.

Uruguay’s Child Rights Approach to Health: What Role for Civil Registration?

In 1934 the Uruguayan legislature passed a ‘Children's Code’, perhaps the first national code explicitly to stipulate that ‘every child has a right to know who are his parents’. This chapter explores the historical context for Uruguay's Children's Code, showing how the late nineteenth-century establishment of civil registration was intertwined with child health monitoring and corresponding public policies and institutions as part of a burgeoning welfare state. It draws out the interaction of these domestic approaches with international debates and practices, demonstrating the role played in these developments by Uruguayan public health's established international reputation, recognized by the League of Nations as the leading Latin American advocate of infant and child health improvement. It also examines how the innovative 1934 code and its associated identity registration features were implemented domestically as an integral part of a fully functioning government child welfare programme, and how Uruguay's approach was diffused internationally.

Voting, Welfare and Registration: The Strange Fate of the État-Civil in French Africa, 1945–1960

In 1946, the French constitution made colonial subjects in Africa into citizens. Having been content to rule ‘tribes’ via their ‘chiefs’, at that point it had to track individuals entitled to vote and receive social benefits. The new citizens retained their personal status — regulating marriage, filiation, and inheritance — under Islamic law or local ‘customs’ rather than through the civil code. That posed a dilemma for French officials, for the état-civil did not just record life events, but symbolized the integration of all into a single body of citizens. French officials and legislators — including African representatives — could not agree on whether the multiple status regimes necessitated two états-civils or one. In the end, officials were too torn between their recognition of difference among peoples under French rule and their desire for singularity to put in place a consistent policy of identification, registration, and surveillance. They bequeathed the problem to their successors.

Monitoring the Abolition of the International Slave Trade: Slave Registration in the British Caribbean

This chapter deals with the background and implementation of the registration of slaves on the island of Trinidad after 1813. Registration was introduced by James Stephen in the British Colonial Office as a means of limiting the inflow of slaves in the illegal slave trade. Slave registration was extended to the other British colonies and then extended every three years until the end of slavery in 1834. Other registrations of slaves are noted, including the manifests of the coastal shipping of slaves in the USA after 1808.

The Identity Thieves of the Indian Ocean: Forgery, Fraud and the Origins of South African Immigration Control, 1890s–1920s

This chapter is about the fate of a registration system designed for the exclusion of ‘undesirable’ Indian migrants to South Africa in the first decades of the twentieth century. It traces the bureaucracy's deployment of residence permits, but shows how these were transacted along the networks established by long-established Indian Ocean merchant houses. This illicit economy provoked important reforms in record-keeping. Yet South Africa's immigration offices remained in disarray for another 15–20 years. The gaps were filled by shrewd criminal touting syndicates within the bureaucracy. More stringent record-keeping was finally in place by the mid-1920s due to help from migrant associations, although this hardly meant that insider subversion had been completely smothered. The chapter argues that South African border controls were not successfully coercive, and suggests that performative histories are important in the study of repressive registration regimes.