Letters to the Governors Beyond the River
Documents doing a passport's job are genuinely ancient. One of the earliest known references is in the Hebrew Bible: Nehemiah 2:7 to 9, dating to roughly 450 BC, describes an official of King Artaxerxes I of Persia asking permission to travel to Judea and receiving a letter "to the governors beyond the river" requesting safe passage.
Other states built whole bureaucracies around the idea. The Indian *Arthashastra* of the third century BCE mentions passes issued at a rate of one masha each, and describes a Superintendent of Seals who had to issue sealed passes before anyone could enter or leave the countryside. In China, passes were an important part of the bureaucracy as early as the Western Han, requiring details such as age, height and bodily features. Even children needed them, though infants under a year in their mother's care may have been exempt.
In the medieval Islamic Caliphate the *bara'a* served as a basic passport. It was a receipt for taxes paid, and only those who had paid were permitted to travel between regions.
Passing the Harbour
The word itself is more literal than it sounds. It likely derives from a document required by some medieval Italian states in order to pass through the physical harbour, *passa porto*, or the gates, *passa porte*, of a walled city.
Those documents worked backwards compared to today. They were issued by local authorities to foreign travellers rather than to a state's own citizens, and generally listed the specific towns and cities the holder was allowed to enter. Seaports were treated as open trading points needing no papers, but you needed a document to leave the port and travel inland.
King Henry V of England is credited with something recognisable as the first modern passport, a way for his subjects to prove who they were abroad, with the earliest reference in a 1414 Act of Parliament. The transition from private to state control over movement was an essential part of the shift from feudalism to capitalism, driven partly by the fact that communities were obliged to provide poor relief and therefore wanted control over who arrived.
The Thirty Years Europe Stopped Checking
Here is the part that surprises people. The expansion of railways and wealth in Europe from the mid-19th century produced such a surge in international travel that the passport system effectively dissolved for about thirty years before the First World War.
The practical reason was speed and volume. Trains were fast, and the number of passengers crossing multiple borders made enforcement of passport laws genuinely difficult. Governments largely gave up and relaxed the requirements.
The result was that from the later 19th century up to the First World War, passports were not generally required for travel within Europe, and crossing a border was a relatively straightforward procedure. Comparatively few people held one at all. It is worth noting what the older system had looked like: before the war, in most situations only adult males could receive a passport, with family members simply written into his document, and even a married woman with a passport of her own could not use it without her husband present.
The Emergency That Never Ended
During the First World War, European governments introduced border passport requirements for security reasons and to control the emigration of people with useful skills. The controls stayed in place after the war ended, becoming standard, though controversial.
The complaints were immediate and strikingly modern. British tourists of the 1920s objected in particular to the attached photographs and physical descriptions, which they felt amounted to a "nasty dehumanisation". Britain's 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act had already defined citizenship clearly, created the booklet form of the passport and made photographs mandatory.
In 1920 the League of Nations held the Paris Conference on Passports and Customs Formalities and Through Tickets, which produced passport guidelines and a general booklet design, followed by further conferences in 1926 and 1927. The League also issued Nansen passports to stateless refugees from 1922 to 1938. Full technical standardisation came much later, in 1980 under the ICAO, which set the rules for machine-readable passports. Biometric passports followed from 1998, and by July 2024 over 150 jurisdictions were issuing them.
