The Right of Registration: Development, Identity Registration, and Social Security—A Historical Perspective

World Development Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 67–86, 2007 Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved 0305-750X/$ - see front matter www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev

doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2006.09.004

The Right of Registration: Development, Identity Registration, and Social Security—A Historical Perspective SIMON SZRETER * University of Cambridge, UK Summary. — Identity registration at birth is a UN proclaimed human right. However, it is not available in many of the world’s poorer countries today. A national system of identity registration dates from 1538 in England and was used by individual citizens to verify their property and inheritance rights and by local communities to verify social security claims. This facilitated the effective functioning of a nationwide social security system and a mobile market in both labor and capital, contributing to Britain’s pioneering process of economic development. Today identity and vital registration systems should also be a high priority for development policy as a democratic institution vital for turning the liberal rhetoric of rights into a reality of empowered individuals. Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Key words — identity registration, human rights, social security, development, institutions, British history 1550–1850, poor law, judiciary, vital registration, states

1. IDENTITY REGISTRATION AS A UN HUMAN RIGHT

and practically available capacity to prove one’s identity, the political rhetoric of human rights, and the academic discourse of entitlements, functionings, and capabilities pioneered by Sen remains, at best, a set of ideals and aspirations for the world’s anonymous poor. Most positive legal and civil rights enshrined in constitutional declarations and the socio-economic provisions granted by states to their citizens are

‘‘Human rights’’ and ‘‘development’’ have been internationally dominant intellectual themes and policy projects throughout the last six decades, since the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the founding of the World Bank in the same decade. There has been a liberal assumption that they go together, although only in the last two decades in the important intellectual project stimulated by Amartya Sen’s work on entitlements and capabilities, has there been a consistent effort to think through this assumption. 1 In this article I want to draw attention to the significance of one practical aspect of both human rights and development, which seems to have been almost entirely overlooked. This is the human right to an identity. To be precise, the right to have one’s legal identity and relationship to significant others publicly recognized, securely registered, and accessible for personal use. I believe a correct appreciation of history indicates this to be of profound importance for both development and human rights. Without the legally sanctioned, secure,

* I would like to thank the audiences who heard and commented on earlier versions of this article given at: the Indepth Network General Meeting in Hanoi; the poverty seminar at the Von Hugel Institute, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge; the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure; the University of Cambridge Department of Community Medicine; the University of Oxford and University of Essex joint Conference on Technologies of Identification; the University of Copenhagen Institute of Public Health; the University of Western Cape School of Public Health; the University of Kwazulu-Natal Department of History; the Manchester Medical Society. I would also like to thank Hilary Cooper, Richard Drayton, Joanna Innes, Andrew Lang, John Powles and Tony Wrigley for assistance and comments on various drafts. 67

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inaccessible and practically worthless to unregistered or otherwise legally non-existent individuals. The international blind spot for the significance of this particular human right is all the more baffling given that it is clearly and unambiguously enshrined in the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which was adopted by the General Assembly in 1966 (and which entered into force in 1976 when 35 States Parties had ratified it). The second clause of Article 24 of the ICCPR states that: Every child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have a name.

In addition, Article 6, Clause 1 of the ICCPR states: Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.

In their authoritative summary of legal commentary on the developing jurisprudence of the UN ICCPR, Joseph, Schultz, and Castan (2000, p. 22) note that: Article 6, the right to life, has been interpreted to incorporate a duty upon States to tackle infant mortality, epidemics, and to take measures to increase life expectancy.

This clause therefore has strong implications for the correct form that a national identity registration system should take. For nation states to take appropriate measures to protect and enhance the life expectancy of their populations, they must have at their disposal accurate and detailed information about patterns and trends of mortality and disease incidence. This requires a comprehensive national death registration system, something which all developed societies possess. However, most of the world’s poorest countries have no such comprehensive registration system. The extremely important and valuable epidemiological work of the ‘‘Indepth’’ network of continuous demographic surveillance sites shows that this would be of enormous health-saving value to the world’s poorest countries today. 2 Thus, the ICCPR in fact creates an obligation on its participants to institute a full identity and vital registration system, including both births and deaths, (and since 1962 there has also been a UN Convention endorsing the importance of marriage registration, the third component of a full civic identity registration system, embracing

legal relationships to all significant others). 3 Additionally, Joseph et al. (2000, p. 7) point out that Article 2 creates a direct and immediate legal obligation on ratifying States to implement the substantive ICCPR guarantees: A state is either fulfilling its obligation or it is not; Article 2(1) seems to allow no exceptions.

Of the 192 member states of the United Nations, 156 are parties to the Covenant, as of July 2006. Furthermore, virtually all the world’s states have also signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 7 of which repeats the ICCPR statement regarding the right to identity registration. 4 Article 6, Article 24 and Article 2 of the ICCPR, alongside Article 7 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, would appear, therefore, to provide a sound and compelling basis in international law for almost all states in the world to have established a nationally comprehensive, efficient, and secure system for the registration of citizens’ identities at birth and also, while they are about it, for the creation of a full vital registration system embracing death and marriage registration. However, a great many states in Africa, in Latin America, and in Asia, representing half or more of the world’s population, have no effective national, universal system of registration at birth or at death (Mathers, Fat, Inoue, Rao, & Lopez, 2005). Although most nominally democratic states make efforts of varying degrees of efficiency to compile ballot registers for voting adults, many have not made any investment in a national system of identity or vital registration for their citizens. Why? Joseph et al. (2000, pp. 24–25) provide some highly relevant interpretations of the reasoning which has been used by the HRC, The Human Rights Committee created under Article 28 of the ICCPR as the monitoring body which interprets the Covenant’s law, when confronted with discrepancies between States Parties’ behavior and the relatively unambiguous and universalist principles, which the same States have signed up to when endorsing the ICCPR. They identify two kinds of reasons for toleration or temporizing in relation to such discrepancies, rather than insistence on the judiciary immediacy apparently entailed by Article 2. Firstly, the HRC ‘‘has never issued a consensus opinion on the relevance of cultural relativism. . .the idea that human rights values, including ICCPR norms, vary across cultures.’’ ‘‘At issue is the degree to which human rights

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are truly universal, or whether uniform imposition of human rights amounts to cultural imperialism. . .’’ (Joseph et al., 2000, pp. 24–25). However, given that, with only a couple of exceptions, all states in the world have voluntarily signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child with its Article 7, this issue of cultural relativism would seem to be irrelevant as an explanation for the absence of identity registration in so many countries or for the HRC’s lack of attention to this continuing failure. Secondly, however, Joseph et al. (2000, pp. 24–25) observe that, ‘‘A related argument is more appropriately termed ‘economic relativism’, whereby it is postulated that the full exercise of certain rights is unsuitable in States with vulnerable developing economies. . . . [the question of] whether uniform imposition of human rights. . . is economically unviable.’’ It is this second, supposedly pragmatic reason, the issue of ‘‘economic relativism’’ and viability, as an apparently reasonable excuse for the absence of a nationwide identity registration system in a poor country, which I want to examine and to expose as mistaken in this article. It will be argued that England’s history of economic development indicates that an identity registration system, in conjunction with collective provision for social security, can both be institutions of fundamental importance for the stimulation of national economic growth, even in relatively poor agrarian economies. 2. IDENTITY REGISTRATION, SOCIAL SECURITY, AND THE FIRST CASE OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN WORLD HISTORY Economic history and economics have always been united on one point at least, which is that the most important single question, which their disciplines each address is that of how self-sustaining (or nowadays one might want to qualify it as ‘‘self-sustainable’’) economic growth occurs. The disciplines of ‘‘development economics’’ and ‘‘development studies’’ and an associated global Leviathan of national, international, and transnational ministries, institutions, and initiatives—from the United Nations and World Bank to the Ford and Gates Foundations, WaterAid and BandAid to the Sachs Report and Tony Blair’s Commission on Africa—all attest to the startling fact that although successful industrialization of national economies has occurred in

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scores of cases around the world, after two centuries of study our understanding of how it has occurred or how to bring it about remains highly imperfect. The specific contribution to this enterprise of economic history has, of course, been to investigate how it happened in the past. The British past provides especially promising and fertile ground for such enquiry. It was the geographical epicentre of the first case of ‘‘development’’ in world history and, thanks partly to its unconquered island history, it also has the most copious set of surviving detailed and diverse records relating to the changing economic relations of land, labor, and capital across the whole of the last half-millennium. Our historical understanding of how economic development occurred in Britain has been progressively widening and deepening for well over a century as scholars have increasingly exploited and connected their findings from this remarkably rich range of surviving historical sources (Kadish, 1989; Koot, 1987). In the early 1980s, three extremely important studies were published, which have each separately and jointly profoundly changed our understanding of the nature of the British industrial revolution and, indeed, of the way in which economic growth happens. One was the reconstruction of the course of population change in England, 1541–1871, undertaken by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (Wrigley & Schofield, 1981). The second was Douglass North’s Structure and Change in Economic History (North, 1981) and the third was the separate and combined work of Harley and Crafts in re-calculating the British economy’s historic growth trajectory (Crafts, 1985; Crafts & Harley, 1992; Harley, 1982). The new demographic estimates, along with the important revisionist analysis of Britain’s national economic accounts, provide the empirical bedrock for the ‘‘early and slow growth’’ interpretation of British economic development, the orthodoxy which now informs our entire research agenda on Britain’s pioneering economic transformation This results in a view of British economic growth as a more evolutionary, gradual but long-sustained process, in which the earlier, gestational stages may have been even more important than the more familiar, sensational later stages when the rash of factory chimney stacks suddenly erupted across the landscape of southern Lancashire. This new historical research agenda has directed our

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attention to the significance of the relatively high level of productivity and commercial development, which Britain had already achieved by the middle of the 18th century. It had previously been believed that British national income grew so fast after 1780 that it had only been at a very modest level before that. It is now understood that growth after 1780 was not quite so rapid as once believed (which is why the new orthodoxy was originally dubbed ‘‘slow’’ growth) and that Britain’s national income was already at a respectable level in the mid-18th century, (about 50% higher than previous estimates). Nearly half a century before the first steam-powered semi-automatic spinning mills started to operate in Lancashire in the 1790s, England’s ‘‘advanced organic’’ 5 agrarian economy was already overtaking both coastal China and The Netherlands as the most urbanized, capitalized and communicationsrich economy in the world. As the accompanying graph (Figure 1) illustrates, from 1600 onwards England’s urban development—an

excellent summary index of economic and commercial advance—was diverging dramatically from the European average (proxied here by the trend line for France) and was gaining rapidly on the world leader, Holland. Historians now see the key question of the world’s first case of economic development as one of explaining how Britain, over the course of the century and a half that preceded the 1780s, arrived at the situation where it was so hungry for the new sources of power and methods of mass production. How had this society and economy arrived at the point where its most perspicacious minds could discern a palpable demand for the expansion of the factory and the application of the steam engine? 6 The research of demographic historians has contributed much to our deeper understanding by examining the way in which a comparatively high standard of living, relatively free from famine mortality was achieved in England and Wales during the early modern period from the 16th to the mid-18th centuries. This was

Figure 1. Urban growth in England (percentage of population living in towns of more than 5,000 inhabitants), The Netherlands and France, 1600–1850. Source: Wrigley (2004, Figure 3.8, p. 89).

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the product of four interlocking institutions, three social and one political: service and apprenticeship for most young adults from the age of about 14, typically residing away from their family home and village of birth; prudential, late, and non-universal marriage for both sexes (most postponed marriage until their mid or late twenties while 15–20% never married, suppressing overall fertility); a kinco-residence taboo ensuring nuclear family households with only non-kin co-resident; and the state-mandated collectivist welfare safetynet of the parish Poor Law, which looked after the elderly (Kussmaul, 1981; Laslett, 1965; Smith, 1986, 1996; Wrigley, 1997, 2004; Wrigley & Schofield, 1981). They and other historians have also explored the significance of the more widely socially distributed patterns of consumption, which this new view of greater mass affluence in the 17th and 18th centuries implies (Brewer & Porter, 1992; De Vries, 1994; King, 1997a, 1997b; Weatherill, 1988); the sources of a higher level of agricultural productivity already achieved over the course of the century before 1750 (Allen, 1992, 2004; Wrigley, 1988, 2006); and the greater economic and cultural importance of urban and commercial life for a whole century and a half before the growth of the industrial shock cities of the 19th century (Borsay, 1989; Langford, 1991, chap. 4; Wrigley, 1987). Meanwhile Douglass North’s contribution, in an entirely complementary way, has also powerfully reinforced this search for the deeper, longer-term, early modern origins of the British economic growth story. North, like Marx and indeed all those thoroughly trained in Smithian analysis, correctly saw that the crucial novelty of the industrial revolution lay in the expansion throughout British society and culture—and thence globally through its colonies, trade, and empire—of the commodification of a wide variety of exchange relationships, both among persons and between persons and things—their environment. This is what we often rather loosely refer to as the expansion of ‘‘the market.’’ Though markets are of course an ancient social institution, North problematized the question of how market activity could expand, a question which the economics profession and economic historians had largely ceased to ask since Smith. 7 North was interested in what was needed in order for reasonably efficient national-scale markets in Adam Smith’s three factors of production, land, capital, and labor, to proliferate. North identified three historical

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developments as being of fundamental importance. Firstly, the emergence of property rights, both as an idea and a practice. It is individuals’ (and families’) capacities to own and dispose of property as they see fit, which creates the incentives for economic action in a market according to North. Secondly, the emergence of modern states capable of protecting and policing those property rights throughout their territorial extents, by enforcing the rule of law. Thirdly, ideology: the accompanying emergence of an appropriate system of justifying moral and ethical beliefs in an economy of properties and commodities. Important aspects of these seminal publications of the 1980s were brought together in Peter Solar’s (1995) fascinating contribution, in which he deployed the value of the comparative perspective to maximum effect in suggesting a dramatic re-thinking of the importance of the English Poor Laws for the history of economic development in Britain. The Poor Laws have always received copious attention from historians, although rarely a ‘‘good press.’’ Heavily influenced by the post-1834 inheritance of the New Poor Law and its notorious deterrent principle of ‘‘less eligibility,’’ the history of the Poor Laws has tended to be approached as the history of social hierarchy, social control, and coercion, class relations, and the experience of poverty. However, from the perspective of continental Europe, most particularly the perspective of historians of Golden Age Holland (Israel, 1995) and its fading powers relative to England, Solar argued that the old Poor Law—the English Poor Laws before 1834— exhibited something of profound positive importance to the development of the English economy, the significance of which Britain’s own historians have failed adequately to conceptualize because, without the comparative perspective, it remained rather invisible to them. 8 This was the simple fact of the existence of the Poor Law—everywhere. It is now clear from a new generation of historical research published since the 1980s that by the middle of the 17th century the whole of England (and Wales by the end of the century) enjoyed a universal and ubiquitous social security system, which actually worked—not just in the towns, and not just in some regions or parishes but in virtually all places (Hindle, 2004; King, 2000; Lees, 1998; Slack, 1988, 1990; Snell, 1985; confirming Leonard, 1900). Solar’s compelling comparative observation was that all the rest of early modern Europe,

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including even highly advanced Holland exhibited, by contrast, a patchiness at best in its social security systems and more usually a complete absence of such a system outside the towns. If one was looking for reasons why the ‘‘advanced organic’’ economy of England prospered increasingly from 1660 onwards, while the continent and even Holland flagged behind, could the distinctive Poor Laws be an important part of the story? And, if so, how was it that an enormous, widespread institution like the Poor Law could work relatively effectively in England and even in rural Wales, when apparently it was beyond the imagination and civic capacity of all other European states at this time? In the remainder of this article, I will firstly review in the next section Solar’s stimulating thesis regarding the importance of the Poor Laws and various critical responses to it. I will also argue that there were two further apparently prosaic, but in fact crucial institutional elements, (one of which was omitted from Solar’s pioneering analysis), which helps to explain why the English Poor Laws actually worked in practice—so ubiquitously and extensively—even when crucial disputes and transaction costs in operating such an expensive and devolved system might otherwise have led to its abandonment. In the following section, I will also argue that these missing pieces of the institutional jigsaw are more widely significant as something necessary to underpin the legal system of property rights, even though DC North himself and, as far as I am aware, those who have followed his insights with further research on the institutional pre-requisites for market-based economic growth—along with the major global institutions attempting to promote institutions for development in today’s poor societies, such as notably the World Bank—have all continued to neglect them (World Bank, 2002). 9 The two missing institutions are, firstly, the importance of the parish registers, a national identity registration system, enabling individuals in a relatively routine, low-cost, and reliable way to verify legally, whenever they should need to do so, their identities, kinship relations, marital statuses, inheritance claims, and place of birth. The second crucial institution was the Justice of the Peace, J.P.s, or magistrates. This also, like the registration system and the Poor Law, was a relatively unique English institution. Certainly, no other country enjoyed the advantage of all three institutions working to-

gether—magistrates, poor law, and identity registration. Magistrates were Crown appointed, locally-resident legal officials sitting in judgement in regular courts of petty sessions, administering local, low level, independent and impartial, cheap, and easily accessible civil and criminal law all around the country. Although the individual J.P.s were typically drawn from among the local landed gentry (a social level below the landed elite), they and their decisions were formally independent of local oligarchies and their interests, in that their judgements were justifiable only against the principles of common and statute law, while they held their appointments only at the pleasure of the Crown, not of the local notables (Landau, 1984). Thus, the Cambridge Group’s recent historical project, which has successfully exploited the historical demographic information contained in the national system of parochial registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials created in the reign of Henry VIII, does not exhaust the registration system’s historical significance for our understanding of how economic development occurred first in Britain. It is by no means a matter of simple serendipity or chance that the society which produced the world’s first ever episode of self-sustaining economic development also created for itself such a detailed continuous inventory of identities—its individual human capital—that the historical researchers of the Cambridge Group have been able, up to four centuries later, to reconstitute ordinary families in their communities and the detailed economic decisions taken by individuals, such as when, where, and whom to marry. We can now come to a knowledge of such details of ordinary people’s lives in this past society only because they originally wanted to know it themselves—and because they created and sustained a public information system to allow themselves to do so. The possession and use by citizens (not the central state) of an identity registration system was an information resource of great value to the individuals of the first society in the world to achieve economic development. This registration system was neither intended nor used as a central state policing tool of surveillance, nor was it used as a private genealogical record for religious purposes, as we know existed in parts of China or as a confessional register as in France. It was a public, local, and civic record, deliberately created by the state in the mid-16th century to be maintained for legal and economic purposes, directly re-

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lated to the needs of individuals operating in England’s precocious nascent property markets. We know this because the system’s instigator recorded his explanation for setting up the system. Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s Vicar-general, who introduced the nationwide system for the registration of all births, deaths, and marriages in 1538, explained its utility in the following terms: . . .for the avoiding of sundry strifes and processes and contentions arising from age, lineal descent, title of inheritance, legitimation of bastardy, and for knowledge, whether any person is our subject or no. (Higgs, 2004a, p. 39)

It is interesting to note that, while insufficient literacy has been considered one of the reasons why it might be unviable for a less developed country today to set up a comprehensive registration system, historians estimate that the English population’s literacy rates in 1540 were no more than 20% for males and well under 10% for females, below that of any country on the face of the globe today (Cressy, 1980, p. 177). Nevertheless, the parochial registration system was not a mere administrator’s dream on Thomas Cromwell’s part. Registers were indeed kept throughout the country, with sufficient numbers surviving to this day for the Cambridge Group to analyze a 4% ‘‘sample’’ of 404 such registers with which to track the population history of England from 1538 onwards (Wrigley & Schofield, 1981). 10 The argument here, therefore, is that the vital registration system operating in the parishes of England and Wales from 1538 onwards was an immensely important institution helping to make possible the world’s first case of self-sustaining market growth in all three of the senses identified as significant by Douglass North. Firstly, it crucially facilitated the workings of a legal system endowing ordinary individuals with their identities and enabling them and their families to exercise their property and other rights. Secondly, it was a paradigmatic example of the effective working of the British state and its capacity to protect the property rights of the individual—the keeping of the parish registers demonstrates the capacity for the devolved writ of the British state to run right down to the level of the parish and the individual subject. Thirdly, as I will argue below, the parish register system may well have been crucial in sustaining the political and legal credibility of the comprehensive social security system of the Poor Laws. This, in turn, was important

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in legitimating ideologically the practices of an expanding market economy and in providing it with the means to address the serious social problems of disruption caused by market growth (Szreter, 1997). Following Solar (1995) and Lees (1998), it can be argued that the existence of the Poor Laws was important in enabling British society during the course of the 17th and 18th centuries gradually to adjust its moral and ethical beliefs so as to accustom itself to the practices and social implications of an increasingly mobile market in land, capital, and labor. 3. THE ENGLISH POOR LAWS AND THE MOBILITY OF LABOR By the middle of the 17th century, though by no means uniform in its procedures, the poor relief system established by two statutes ‘‘For the Relief of the Poor’’ of 1598 and 1601, was a genuine reality in full operational force throughout the land (Hindle, 2004; Slack, 1990). This placed the English population and its labor market, both in town and countryside, on an entirely different basis, in terms of social security, from that of the rest of Europe (Solar, 1995). Consequently, the English (but not the Irish nor the Scottish, where there was no such Poor Law, nor an Anglican parochial registration system 11) were the first people in the world to cease to experience national faminerelated mortality, a freedom achieved by the second half of the 17th century (Outhwaite, 1991, chap. 2). Peter Solar (1995) has furthermore argued that the comprehensive social security system provided by the Poor Laws had a number of highly significant economic consequences, of relevance to England’s high and rising levels of both agricultural productivity and urbanization during the 17th and 18th centuries. In particular, in combination with the very important prior institutional innovation of the early establishment in English law of complete alienability of land (from the 13th century), 12 it had the potential to encourage labor mobility and emancipation from a peasant mentality of over-attachment to land holding as the only form of security. Individuals had a relative certainty, within the rules governing Poor Law settlement rights and the associated system of certificates, 13 of being provided for, wherever they moved to work in the economy, no matter what their property-ownership status.

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Landlords and farmers could reap the economic gains to be had from increased farm sizes, from enclosure and from laying-off workers or changing their labor contracts to more efficient weekly or day labor, without this provoking the same fears and strength of protests from those adversely affected, as such attempts elicited on the continent. But equally, such employers in England had a strong incentive only to do this if it really made economic sense, because, as ratepayers into the parish Poor Law fund, they would also have to reckon with their liability for supporting the families of the laidoff workers, at least in the short term until they found new work. Thus, from the point of view of the smallholder or tenant, given such genuine social security, working for wages—whether in the countryside or in the town—was not necessarily any less secure than access to the land. There was no need to fetishize land ownership among the poor as their cherished symbol of family security, as happened among the peasantry on the continent, notoriously in France, whose agriculture was afflicted with the practice of ‘‘morcellement’’ (Solar, 1995). Additionally, as Richard Smith, has emphasized, under the English Poor Laws, another reason for both attachment to land holding at all costs and for a restriction on the labor mobility of the younger generation was attenuated, in that the aged poor, disabled, and widowed had an alternative source of support in this recognized right to call on the parish fund, obviating the absolute necessity to retain close contact between the family’s generations (Smith, 1986). Steve King has disputed Solar’s interpretation, pointing-out that the practices of the Poor Law in England varied substantially in different regions, counties, and even adjacent parishes (King, 1997a). Solar has responded, however, that, despite such variation in practices, the force of the comparative perspective is precisely the point that there were relief practices occurring everywhere throughout England–albeit highly negotiated and in their profusion of local differences–whereas on the continent they simply did not exist at all across extensive tracts of the country (Solar, 1997). In his subsequent contribution, King has used evidence for the 18th century to propose two different regional Poor Law regimes (King, 2000). He argues that in the north poor relief was often operated in a relatively stringent and parsimonious fashion, pushing poor people’s survival capacities to the limits (although it should be noted that these ‘‘limits’’ do not seem to have over-stepped

the mark in producing any detectable patterns of dearth-related mortality, as noted above). As for the south, King accepts Solar’s depiction of a more generous regime (King, 2000, esp. chap. 7). This would seem, then, to leave substantially intact Solar’s main points concerning the role of the Poor Law as a ubiquitous backstop and guarantor and, in particular, as an important contributory explanation for the high productivity of England’s ‘‘advanced organic’’ economy, ca. 1550–1750, since this economy was predominantly located in the southern half of England—this is where twothirds of the national population and more than two-thirds of the national wealth were located throughout this period (Szreter, 2005, p. 356). Thus, although in no way a voting democracy, the subjects of the British sovereign in the 17th and 18th centuries enjoyed, relative to the rural laboring poor of the rest of Europe at that time, ‘‘advanced,’’ state-guaranteed practical entitlements to security and health— functionings and capabilities in Sen’s (1999) terminology. Note that the argument here is not that the English Poor Law and its ubiquitous operation provided persons with their preferred means of social security. However, through its mandatory existence in every parish, it did provide a basis for the actual achievement of a state of personal social security, which was underwritten not merely by reliance on the compassion of others, but by an institutionally permanent and unavoidable social obligation. The Poor Law, and its enforcement both by the Privy Council and by magistrates (Innes, 1999; Slack, 1988), created everywhere in England a very public system of acknowledgement of collective responsibility for the subsistence of all. This included, for instance, as the recent research in both southern and northern regions by Nutt (2005) has shown, a strikingly nonmoralistic and caring approach to the support of single mothers and their illegitimate children, a category often stigmatized and marginalized in other contexts lacking a universalistic social security system. 14 Public, parish provision of housing for the poor (Broad, 2000) is another example of how developed the social security system could become locally before 1834. This did not mean that there was not harshness and pettiness in the operation of a system dealing with those in unfortunate circumstances. Not surprisingly, those in need preferred, if they could, to draw support from a range of

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other, non-official, sources, such as kin, neighbors, individual philanthropists and charities, as historians have emphasized (Feldman, 2003). But it does mean that those who lacked these sources of support did not simply fall through this precious but frequently frayed network of informal, private acts of solidarity. Hence, the compelling comparative evidence, at the aggregate level, of a relative lack of correlation in England, alone in all of Europe at this time, between fluctuations in the price of food and the death rate (Galloway, 1988). After all, non-governmental forms of support existed throughout much of the rest of Europe in a profusion of varieties, involving church, kin, neighbors, and philanthropy. They worked for most people for most of the time, but crucially when the chips were really down for an entire community, as in times of serious dearth, they could fail—and fail disastrously. The Poor Law meant that in England and Wales from about the mid-17th century, social security functioned with virtual certainty for all people all of the time. Indeed, given the evidence that has been uncovered by historians of the poor of ‘‘an economy of makeshifts,’’ often involving kin and neighbors (King & Tomkins, 2003), and of much philanthropic and mutualist activity (Feldman, 2003), it is also plausible to argue that far from ‘‘crowding-out’’ alternative forms of social support, the existence of the locallydevolved and entirely locally-funded Poor Law in fact encouraged all citizens to think and act more purposefully about the problems of insecurity of income, health, and welfare; and that this issued in a wider, not narrower, range of private responses and behaviors than in most other societies (Innes, 1996; Smith, 1996). In other words, the state’s institutionalization of the fundamentals of social security, by bringing into reality a juridically contested practice of collective provision in every town and village throughout the land, created the world’s first ‘‘welfare society,’’ a people for whom the issue of the livelihood and security of not only their own family and their neighbors but also of perfect strangers was now defined as their own problem, unless they could prove otherwise. The onus and the burden of proof was decisively shifted by the Elizabethan Poor Laws and their enforcement in the course of the subsequent century, in favor of a collective responsibility of all for all. The Poor Law, funded entirely from local taxation, created a very clear set of responsibilities on those with

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means to support those without, also thereby bringing into being a form of local political insurance and security against social unrest. This consequently created a whole new discourse of and about welfare and an associated legal practice, supervised by magistrates, both within parishes and between parishes, about where such responsibilities properly lay (Nutt, 2005). This, broadly speaking, is the interpretation offered by Lees (1998). In addition to the vital resource for civil society of the locally accessible magistrates’ courts for settling all disputes, the parishes’ registers of births, deaths, and marriages were probably also crucial in permitting this universalist system of locally-administered social security to acquire long-term consent and credibility among the diverse communities of local ratepayers who were dragooned by statute into compulsory financial support for the system in each and every parish round the country. A version of the ‘‘free rider’’ problem is an absolutely standard feature of any scheme of pooled social insurance risk, which is essentially what the Elizabethan Poor Law mandated in each of the parishes of England and Wales. There needs to be robust and accepted rules to ensure a viable balance between the liabilities of those contributing to such a collective, local fund, and the level of demands legitimately made on the fund. A critical problem with this highly devolved system of small, parish-scale social security funds, is the possibility of certain parishes becoming temporarily (or regularly) inundated with mobile claimants, whom they cannot afford to support. This problem inevitably emerged during the early 17th century as the Poor Law system bedded-in. The British state duly responded by passing the series of statues relating to the Settlement Laws, which provided an evolving set of regulations for defining the relief liabilities of parishes to individuals born, residing, and working within their boundaries. 15 The Settlement Acts were crucial for the successful functioning of the Poor Laws as a locally-devolved system. Had the Poor Laws not been supplemented by the Settlement Acts it seems likely either that the whole social security system would have fallen into disrepute and disuse because of the impracticality of unlimited liability for the ratepayers of each parish or else the Poor Laws would have come to exert a powerful perverse incentive—from the point of view of economic growth—by producing a ‘‘siege’’ mentality in each and every parish,

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thereby institutionally impeding the mobility of labor around the economy. Some historians have argued (as Adam Smith did—see note 20) that something of the latter effect did occur (Landau, 1990). However, the only available detailed empirical study of the workings of the settlement laws under the old Poor Law in the industrial North has shown how the magistrate-supervised system meant that the Settlement Laws could be operated with great local flexibility in response to regional labor needs (Taylor, 1989). Taylor concluded that the regional practice there of non-resident relief was ‘‘ideally suited to the industrial North and provided a cushion in times of cyclical unemployment, allowing the poor to seek jobs where they might find them.’’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 143). The fact that England exhibited the highest rate of urbanization in Europe during the era of the old Poor Law and its rules of settlement, as Figure 1 shows, would seem to be conclusive evidence that, on balance, these institutions strongly encouraged, rather than impeded labor mobility. 16 I would argue that the combination of Poor Laws and Settlement Laws was able to work relatively effectively as a system of relief commanding practical assent, giving genuine social security to the whole population, and as a mechanism which, on balance, facilitated rather than impeded the mobility of labor required for economic growth in an advanced organic economy; and that this was because its workings were crucially facilitated by both the magistrates’ courts and the parish registration system. This meant that both ratepayers and administrators of the system could have confidence that several categories of the most frequent, vexatious disputes between parishes about relief liabilities for particular individuals under the Settlement rules could be authoritatively resolved locally by magistrates, while in a proportion of such cases recourse to the records held in the parish registers, alone, was sufficient. The argument here is certainly not that parish registers could solve all manner of problems associated with the operation of the Poor Laws but that they could and did provide the information basis with which a considerable range of practical disputes related to the Settlement Acts could be resolved. This alleviated the burden of liability and uncertainty within the system, which might otherwise have resulted in its breakdown or disuse, as in other parts of continental Europe. Although there have as yet been no published studies of the use of par-

ish registers for this purpose, the historical scholar who has most extensively analyzed a wide range of settlement examination records during the period 1660–1834, Snell (1985), has confirmed that he frequently noticed the use of parish registers to adjudicate settlement disputes in this way. 17 Thus, identity registration—and the capacity for its legal exercise—in addition to being a fundamental human right, as recognized today in UN Conventions, was an important institution which facilitated the consolidation over two centuries of the practical and political viability of the highly unusual, universalist, locally-devolved English social security system. And it was this unique social security system which, in turn, played an integral role in permitting the British agrarian economy its high level of labor mobility during the century of rising economic productivity and commercial expansion which ultimately produced the industrial revolution. 4. IDENTITY REGISTRATION AND THE MOBILITY OF CAPITAL Returning to North’s emphasis on the importance of the historical development of a generally available system of property rights supported by the state and the rule of law in order for widely dispersed market activity and capital mobility to occur, in the field of development studies this insight has recently gained much prominence through the work of De Soto (2000). Comparing the history of 19th-century USA with his native Peru and other less developed countries De Soto identified the failure of an appropriate system of formal property law, enabling persons to gain recognized legal title to the ownership of their assets, to emerge in countries such as his own Peru, as a gross institutional disability preventing capital formation among the poor (De Soto, 2000). This failure restricts the commercial usage to which all but the richest in society (who alone can afford the costs, bribes, and delays of the tortuous legal processes) can assign their assets–homes, land, businesses. For the rest of the populace, their inability to gain legal formal title to their assets means that these cannot be used as capital—as a security to generate credit or funds for investment in productive enterprises. However, De Soto’s research and policy prescriptions seem incomplete in overlooking the importance of one further, crucial institutional

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factor needed for a diffuse system of property rights in society. De Soto seems to assume that the legal and public recognition of individuals’ personal identities is a non-problematic issue. De Soto focuses on only one half of the problem of creating fixity and security of legal title for property rights, and omits the question of fixing the legal identity of persons themselves in many poor countries. As we have seen, with her parish registration system as with her social security system, the English pre-industrial economy was highly precocious in this aspect of its institutional development. Although, intriguingly, England almost lost both of these institutional resources once the rapid economic growth and hectic urban expansion of the steam-powered industrial revolution took effect during the opening 3–4 decades of the 19th century (when national economic growth rates rose consistently to just under 2% per annum for the first time in human history). In this formative era of free market expansionism with its newly dominant ideology of laisez-faire economic ‘‘science,’’ the statebacked system of social security was now disparaged. In a close parallel to the neo-liberal views which gained a general ascendancy in international development policy during the last two decades of the 20th century, it was the contention of this first generation of classical liberal economists that the country’s venerable ‘‘welfare’’ system was overly-generous, laxly administered, and a self-defeating encouragement to a dependency culture. Reverend Thomas Malthus was the most well-known among a number of rich and powerful advocates of this viewpoint (Brundage, 1978; Mandler, 1987). In response to these arguments, national expenditure on the Poor Laws was slashed by half in 1834, cut from approximately 2% of the national income (at that time the most generous level of support in Europe) down to 1%, as it was re-designed as a deterrent system, effectively stigmatizing those who used it (Rose, 1986; Slack, 1990). As in Third World cities today, in these circumstances of the withdrawal or absence of state-sanctioned social security, do-it-yourself forms of assistance came into being, born of necessity. In Britain, due to its long-term inheritance of the nuclear family household and collectivist welfare practices, extended family and kinship links were not necessarily the primary source of support turned to, as they often are in poor countries today. Instead this support was often provided by small, single-chapel reli-

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gious congregations led by local charismatic figures (Gilbert, 1976; Mason, 1994), or by certain of the local business leaders themselves, endeavoring to look after their work-forces as well as they could (Roberts, 1979). Trade-based Friendly Societies of mutual insurance among the workers (and rudimentary trade-unions) also seem to have grown substantially in numbers and membership after 1834 in response to this predicament (Neave, 1996; Reid, 2004). It seems likely that much of this story is playing itself out again today in the tearaway economic growth being experienced in parts of urban China. Like Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, China’s national economic growth rates during the 1990s and 2000s signify soaring national economic success. But the urban economy is being powered by a vulnerable, rural in-migrant workforce, notably in China’s case, the so-called ‘‘black population’’ drawn disproportionately from a staggering, estimated 200 million ‘‘unplanned’’ births—unregistered citizens, lacking positive recognition of their identity from the Chinese state and therefore subject to compromised legal and civic rights and problematic access to official systems of support (Greenhalgh, 2004, Table 8.3, p. 163). In early 19th-century Britain, the registration system was also almost swept away in the disruption and turmoil of a society experiencing mass migration from the countryside to the mill-towns, as the steam-powered factories rendered cottage production redundant (Pooley & D’Cruze, 1994), along with the expansion of nonconformist chapels owing no allegiance to the established church and its registers. 18 However, the growing commercial and propertyowning classes in society were sufficiently well aware that identity registration was of vital importance to their dynastic economic interests. Quite to the contrary of being prepared to see the country’s system of identity registration fall into disrepair and disuse, they wanted a much improved, comprehensive, and accessible national registration system established to serve their needs. Thus, in the first chapter of his recent study of the history of the General Register Office of England and Wales (GRO), Higgs (2004b), has finally run to ground the full story of the political motivation for the creation of this Office by statute in 1836. This is something which had eluded several previous scholars, who had thought the primary motivation for creating the GRO came either from religious dissenters or from public health motives (because public

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health doctors subsequently rapidly seized the opportunity presented by a national civil register of deaths to pioneer the study of the country’s ‘‘vital statistics’’ 19). Higgs convincingly shows that the real political context for the creation of a nationally-funded and administered civil registration system of births, deaths, and marriages for all, regardless of religious affiliation, was a growing social movement among the country’s propertied middle classes ‘‘to establish state institutions for the recording and preservation of titles to property’’ (Higgs, 2004b, p. 9). This political campaign issued in the government appointment of the Real Property Commission, 1829–33. The commission’s recommendations and the wider movement’s concerns ultimately led to the establishment of a whole set of inter-related official institutions for recording legal title to property (including the new moveable and intellectual property of the industrial and commercial age), such as the Public Record Office, the Patent Office, the Land Registry, and the Central Probate Office. Hence, like each of these property registration offices, the GRO’s alphabetical family name indexes (for easy access by the general public to their personal records) were housed in Somerset House on the Strand, conveniently near to these other legal record institutions and to the inns of court, since it was anticipated this would be the main use of this new state-funded service for verifying personal identity. Higgs has also drawn attention to the fact that the motivation for the establishment of a secular civil registration service in the early 19th century was essentially a reassertion of the importance of the expressed motives for the original establishment by the Tudor state of the first such national system of identity registration, the Anglican parish registers of the 16th century, which, to recall, were primarily ‘‘for the avoiding of sundry strifes and processes and contentions arising from age, lineal descent, title of inheritance, legitimation of bastardy’’ (Higgs, 2004b, p. 10). By the 1830s, the effectiveness of the nearly three-centuries-old Anglican parochial system had become compromised for a number of reasons. It was locally (diocesan) based, whereas a centralized registry was now needed by individuals and families operating in a truly national, integrated economy. Many central city parishes were becoming overwhelmed by the workload in the fast-growing towns and, most obviously, the Anglican system did not suit well the interests of the growing numbers of nonconformists,

who complained that they had to endure an alien, Anglican marriage ceremony to ensure a legal record to protect their family’s property interests. Indeed, the Quakers, one of the oldest, most organized and urban of the Dissenting communities, had from early in their history recognized the importance of keeping their own, separate vital registers for this purpose. By the 18th century Quakers were also using their registers as evidence for individuals’ qualification for support from their own Quaker social security funds, again pointing up the intimate relationship I have suggested between identity registration and a working system of social security, in order to finesse the free rider problem (Vann & Eversley, 1992, pp. 15–16). 5. CONCLUSIONS: THE IMPORTANCE OF IDENTITY REGISTRATION, ACCESSIBLE LOCAL JUSTICE, AND SOCIAL SECURITY FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Thus, I would argue that there are important lessons which can be drawn from the new, revisionist history, emphasizing the significance of the early phase of gradual economic development in the British historical case. As Figure 1 illustrates, during 1540–1780, Britain moved from a position as a small, average economy on the European periphery to that of world leader, primarily because of the increased efficiency of its agrarian economy. England was blessed with a range of crucial, state-sanctioned legal and social institutions facilitating free markets in land, capital, and labor, while simultaneously providing more effective personal and collective social security to its capitalists and to individual laborers and their family members than anywhere else in the world. Britain’s history indicates that those who, like De Soto and the World Bank, are seeking to foster economic development and the expansion of market activity in countries like those of Latin America or Africa today through a post-Douglass North focus on constructing the appropriate institutions required for markets to flourish, need to start by empowering individuals with an accessible and secure system for registering their own identities. The machinery of civil, vital registration is a necessary practical complement to De Soto’s emphasis on the need for property title laws and agencies of enforcement to enable all in society—not just the rich—to mobilize their assets into capital. This is not,

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of course, to suggest that an identity registration system—or even an identity registration system along with a collective social security system—are, alone, sufficient policy levers to produce economic development. However, I would argue that both of these are wise and necessary policies, which, along with the concept of private property and the rule of law, create a propitious institutional environment for encouraging indigenous market behavior on the part of a widening range of individuals in society. Registration can also be a multi-faceted institutional mechanism for simultaneously promoting economic growth, population health, and welfare (three goals which do not necessarily always coincide—Easterlin, 1999; Szreter, 1997). Vital registration provides the crucial information for implementing an accurate and precise epidemiological intelligence system, as happened in Victorian Britain (Eyler, 1979). Indeed, the British state and its various local government authorities by the 1870s possessed a more comprehensive and detailed knowledge of citizens’ changing health patterns than exists today in many countries of the world (Szreter, 2005, chaps. 4, 8). Without this quality of information, the promotion of public health investments and services for the most needy are very difficult to implement effectively. The reading of the origins of early modern economic growth in Britain offered here would suggest, following North’s and Solar’s leads, that a nationwide social security system, funded through progressive local taxation (as the Poor Law was, since it was a local property tax), combined with vital registration and a cheap, impartial, locally accessible legal system, provide vitally important and necessary foundational institutional endowments for encouraging market growth and the mobility of labor and capital. Whereas Joseph et al. (2000) expressed a widespread commonsense assumption that the world’s poor countries might not be able to afford such institutions as the identity registration systems envisaged in the ICCPR, rather than being an optional afterthought in the process of economic development, the lessons of history suggest that such poor countries cannot afford not to invest in such institutions, if economic development through their own citizens’ market activity is their longer-term goal. In the world’s very poorest countries, such as Malawi, the full gamut of institutional innova-

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tions, which gradually emerged in early modern England are all still lacking today. There is no formal individual ownership of land, but allocation by custom and village chiefs, which makes possible only informal ‘‘purchase’’ or lease with no legal protection (Guest, 2004, chap. 3). There is no social security for individuals beyond the bonds of blood and local church or mosque membership; and there is no nationwide general registration of births, deaths, or marriages. It is unrealistic for either the government or the World Bank to formulate ambitious plans and policies for national economic development, without addressing the absence of these fundamental institutions. With no other form of meaningful security for all but a tiny elite, most persons in Malawi— very sensibly—aim to maintain good relations with their kin, local co-religionists, and their village chief as the top priority in life. It is all but impossible for most to accumulate personal capital and it is highly dangerous to weaken close personal bonds with one’s recognized lineage network and home community. The selfrighteous (and hypocritical) western rhetoric denouncing ‘‘corruption’’ in government and throughout society in the world’s poorest countries is in part a deep mis-reading and mis-understanding of the alternative, highly rational economic rules of loyalty to primary networks, which simply must prevail as the self-preservative norm in a society without collectively provided forms of social security and where most cannot accumulate personal wealth. Action as a ‘‘free agent’’ in the market economy simply does not make sense to the vast majority in a country like Malawi without significant change to the institutional context. England, in common with most other nowdeveloped societies, only achieved such change in the encompassing institutions, which in turn permit people’s motives and behavior to change, over the course of several centuries. Malawi’s government can start the country on this path, with technical assistance and financial support from the international community, but it will require the time necessary for at least one or two generations to grow up and mature under the new rules of the game before Malawian life can be expected to adapt and prosper so that it makes sense for more individuals to act as market agents. Neo-liberal economists meanwhile will object to any kinds of ‘‘subsidies,’’ such as those offered by a social security system as advocated here, because this introduces distortion of incentives, from the

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theoretical perspective of a micro-economics analysis of the operation of free markets. But from a historical and practical perspective, it can be seen that it was only confidence in the existence of such a collectively-funded, reasonably fair, and ubiquitous social security system, which enabled individuals of the laboring poor in early modern England to act as price takers for their labor in the national economy. Paradoxically (from the point of view of microeconomic theory), a society such as Malawi’s today, needs such a social security system (along of course with changes to land ownership rules) to change the whole incentive structure of its communities—with their intense reliance on kin and community networks—so that individuals can begin to respond, without distortion, to the signals of the market. 20 Despite its importance in the British historical case, one can look in vain at many of the most influential international policy documents, such as the annual World Development or UNDP reports or the outcomes of important commissions, such as the WHO/WTO Sachs Report or even the World Bank’s own recent Special Report on ‘‘Human Rights and Development’’ (World Bank Institute, 2006) for any references in them to the importance of promoting practical schemes for establishing safe identity and vital registration systems. 21 The problems involved in achieving such systems in many contexts are far from trivial and will require much thought, negotiation, and ingenuity. 22 But if there is one single foundational policy that the world’s poor require, it is public acknowledgement of their individual existence from birth to death. The possibility that such identity registration systems could be and, indeed have been used by a deformed political regime for political surveillance and repression (Seltzer & Anderson, 2001), as in apartheid South Africa (Breckenridge, 2005a), does not negate the value of the argument being presented here and the policy being proposed. All tools, institutions, and social assets can be used for both positive and negative purposes and the more powerful and important the tool, the greater is its potential impact. The fact that the Nazi regime tragically was able to exploit the national identity information system of Holland to locate Jews more effectively in order to do them harm does not mean that an identity registration system is so intrinsically dangerous that it should not be constructed—any more than the Nazis’ use of Europe’s rail system to expedite the Jews in

large numbers to their fates means that railway technology is an intrinsically sinister threat. However, it does mean that serious consideration must be given to the ethical implications of creating such information systems. Firstly, there needs to be consent to rules of ownership of the information. Identity registration systems create a category of public information about persons, but this should be considered to be the private property of the individual to whom it relates, alone. Only from this premise should any possible further uses of the information by other parties be considered, with public health epidemiological uses by accredited professionals probably being the only such legitimate further use which should be allowed by design. As Breckenridge (2005b) has warned in relation to the concrete example of post-apartheid South Africa’s new biometric technology, the recognition of this ownership principle means that very serious thought must be given to the kinds of identity information systems that are created, the precise technology of construction, and modes of access (which should be essentially by private individual and opaque to state or commercial uses). Attention must be given to the laws surrounding the use of the system and the possibility, for instance, of invoking international sanctions on any state or company abusing this aspect of an individual’s human rights (as in principle should apply to the violation of any of the other human rights of the citizens of those states who are participants to the UN covenants and charters). One possible policy conclusion to draw might be that it is advisable to propose that a society invests in a system of identity registration only where there is confidence that its constitution is democratic and that its civic society is robust. One crucial signifier of a robust civil society is the existence of an accessible, impartial, and independent system of recourse to law for the common people, akin to the magistrates’ courts of petty and Quarter sessions in early modern England. The system of magistrates’ courts was a close historical approximation to the institutional embodiment of a positive form of linking social capital. 23 There is, it must be acknowledged, something of a chicken-andegg relationship here between the strength of civic society and its bridging and linking social capital, the liberty of citizens, the practical accountability of democratic states, and the existence of a safe and accessible identity registration system. With its strong and independent

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judiciary and legal profession, England’s citizens as early as the 16th and 17th centuries were enjoying the use of a system of identity registration suitable to their own purposes, while the central state lacked even a rudimentary map of their property and possessions. Yet at the same time in subjugated, ‘‘colonial’’ Ireland the same central state in London successfully imposed a thorough mapping exercise as early as 1679 on a country, whose predominantly catholic and property-less populace and weak civic society was to remain without an identity registration system for nearly two more centuries (Scott, 1998, p. 49). Another possible policy conclusion which might follow from these various ethical and practical considerations is that although systems of identity registration for citizens require the recognition and support of national states and their laws, they would best be constituted as autonomous institutions, independent of elected national governments and their changing political agendas and ultimately answerable only to the United Nations and international law. This would not seem to be such a radical suggestion, given that all the many states who are participants in the UN ICCPR have already acknowledged that the Rights prescribed by the Covenant follow from acceptance by the States Parties of commitments to a higher set of principles than those indicated by national interest or raison d’etat; and the right to identity regis-

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tration is, of course, one of these Civil and Political Rights. We may, perhaps, look to the future report of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health to emphasize the importance of comprehensive vital registration in every country for generating the high quality epidemiological information required for devising the most effective policies to promote population health. There has already been a start in this direction from the Gates-funded Health Metrics Network. 24 But, valuable though this is, the point, which this article has tried to labor, is that the importance of identity registration is not just an issue of vital registration for public health and epidemiological purposes. The continuing lack of universal civil identity registration systems in many poor countries and communities is both a human rights scandal and a fundamental development obstacle, which the world’s most powerful international organizations for promoting economic development should treat as among their highest priorities to address, while giving due consideration to the crucial point that these systems, though necessarily supported with the authority and resources of national governments, need to be protected against possible abuses. Identity registration systems must be created principally for the liberty and the use of private individuals, and not to serve the purposes of commercial organizations or states.

NOTES 1. Sen (1999) provides an accessible summary statement. See also the website of the Human Development and Capability Association, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~freedoms/ and the Von Hugel Institute’s Capability and Sustainability Centre, http://www. stedmunds.cam.ac.uk/csc/.

2. http://www.indepth-network.net/dss_site_profiles/ dss_sites.htm. Indepth publishes a monograph series, an online series, and articles from the research done at individual sites. See http://www.indepth-network.net/ publications/zindpubs/indepthpubs.htm.

3. Article 3 of the 1962 UN Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriages and Registration of Marriages, states, ‘‘All marriages shall be registered in an appropriate official register by the competent authority.’’ I use the term ‘‘significant others’’

since, with the decline in popularity of marriage in developed societies and the rise of same-sex and consensual unions, there has been an appreciation on the part of those making these choices that it is in their interests to acquire state and legal recognition for these new forms of unions, which create relationships which they wish to have recognized as equivalent to those created by marriages.

4. http://www.unhchr.ch/pdf/report.pdf. By October 2006, 192 countries have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which came into force on 2nd September 1990 (only Somalia and United States have not ratified). Article 7 of this Convention states: ‘‘The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and, as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.’’ http:// www.unicef.org/crc/crc.htm.

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5. The term is from Wrigley’s classic interpretative lectures: Wrigley (1988). 6. Letter from Matthew Boulton to James Watt, June 1781, reproduced in Sproule (1992): ‘‘The people in London, Manchester, and Birmingham are steam mill mad. I do not mean to hurry you, but I think in the course of a month or two, we should determine to take out a patent for certain methods of producing rotative motion. . .There is no other Cornwall to be found [pumping water out of Cornish tin mines had provided the first market for early steam engines], and the most likely line for the consumption of our engines is the application of them to mills which is certainly an extensive field.’’ This letter provides direct evidence of the stimulus from the market, interpreted by Boulton, prompting his partner, Watt, to patent the sun and planets gearing system for the rotary action steam engine, which he did in 1782. 7. Although Coase’s (1937) seminal analysis of transaction costs, ‘‘The nature of the firm,’’ was an important exception to this generalization among economists. While social historians had always ‘‘problematized’’ the coming of the market—the ‘‘cash nexus’’—this had been more to denounce it in moral terms for its social consequences, rather than to investigate its fragility and the unusual historical conditions required for thoroughgoing commodification to occur. See for instance Polanyi (1957) and Thompson (1963), though of course Tawney’s (1926) classic essay on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism did focus on the ideology of capitalism, one important aspect of North’s agenda. 8. As Innes (2002) shows, there was an increasing contemporary awareness of the comparative perspective and the uniqueness of England’s social security system from about the 1770s onwards. However, this occurred primarily in the context of increasingly strident calls for the reform or even abolition of the expensive English system—most prominently from Malthus. By contrast, Richard Woodward, Bishop of Clogher in Ireland, argued, to the contrary, that Ireland suffered because of a lack of any poor law. Innes points out that although the reform of the Poor Law in 1834 drastically reduced and made ‘‘less eligible’’ the terms on which the poor received support (the workhouse test), it did not abolish a local tax-funded national system, as some were demanding, and it was soon followed by extension of the principle to both Ireland (1838) and Scotland (1845), albeit in the minimally generous form of the 1834 workhouse test system. 9. But see the most recent World Development Report: World Bank (2006, chap. 6 and Box 6.4).

10. Wrigley and Schofield certainly had to deal with the problem that there were many gaps in the surviving parish registration material which they exploited for their massive study, but they did not attribute these gaps to the failure of parish registers to be kept from 1538 in some or in any parishes, but rather to the problems of physical survival of such records over the centuries. I have verified this point in personal conversations with both Wrigley and Schofield, who confirmed that nothing they have seen leads them to suppose that an essentially geographically complete, national system of parish registers were not instituted in England from 1538 onwards. 11. The Church of Scotland’s parish registers were very inadequately maintained before civil registration was belatedly established in 1854, while a civil registration system for Ireland was only finally enacted in 1864. On Ireland and Scotland’s poor laws, see note 8, above. 12. Macfarlane (1978, pp. 82–83), citing Maitland, the eminent historian of English law. 13. From the late 17th century, individuals could be issued with portable certificates from their parish of settlement, acknowledging its responsibility for their relief: Solar and Smith (2003, p. 472). See also note 15. 14. Nutt (2005). For contrasting treatments of unmarried pregnant women in other societies at this time, see for instance Kertzer (1993). 15. The first ‘‘Settlement Law’’ was the 1662 Act ‘‘For the Better Relief of the Poor of this Kingdom’’ and there then followed numerous further acts, such as those in 1686, 1692, 1697, 1723, and 1795 modifying the rules and procedures in various ways (Feldman, 2003; Slack, 1990). 16. As Wrigley (1987, chap. 6) has demonstrated, due to the relatively high urban death rates of the entire early modern era, substantial aggregate urban growth, as England exhibited from 1600 through to 1800, could only be sustained through high rates of mobility and migration from the countryside to the town. The fact that England experienced greater urbanization during these two centuries than the rest of Europe must mean that rates of migration from countryside to town were greater than anywhere else in Europe. See also note 13. 17. Personal communication KDM Snell to SRS Szreter 30/4/04: ‘‘I have often seen it in settlement disputes. It can happen informally: the parish writes to the incumbent asking for details and a copy of the entry in the register, and usually this relates to marriage for a

THE RIGHT OF REGISTRATION woman (who took her husband’s settlement, so they need to check that she is legally married), or to paternal settlement (some people follow their father’s settlement, if they fail to gain one in their own right), or to a bastard (who took the parish where s/he was ‘‘dropped,’’ and usually registered); or more rarely they are trying to find out where a man came from so that further investigations can be conducted to see where he is legally settled. Paupers can, in some circumstances, become rather silent or forgetful on these issues, if they do not wish to be removed to a certain place. And then there are cases where someone became insane, and again parish registers are sometimes used to try to discover where the person may have come from, and perhaps been settled, especially if that person cannot speak for himself, and others are in doubt on this matter. Beyond marriage, paternal settlement, and perhaps illegitimate birth registration, the parish register does not amount to any firm evidence on settlement, but it provides clues that they can then follow up. You sometimes find slips of paper from the incumbent in bundles of settlement records commenting on such cases, with copied lines from the register. Clergymen even try to charge for this service occasionally, and on other occasions they are serving their own parish. And it happens more formally too, when parishes are actually in dispute at Quarter Sessions [hearings held by J.P.s four times per year,] where again such evidence can be crucial. One finds the register referred to quite frequently in case of papers relating to such disputes, which of course occur in their thousands every year, being among the biggest items of Sessions business. I’ve seen the register referred to in such ways in periods from the late 17th to the mid-19th centuries.’’ 18. On the Anglican Church’s efforts to deal with this problem in the early 19th century, see Basten (2006). 19. The Victorian term for epidemiology: Eyler (1979); Szreter (2005, chap. 8). 20. Smith (1776) in The Wealth of Nations was the first of many liberal economists to discount this crucial point about the structure of incentives, denouncing England’s old Poor Law and its Settlement Acts (Smith, 1970, pp. 240–245). Smith believed these institutions fatally impeded the mobility of labor, apparently not realizing that England’s extraordinary rate of urbanization during his own lifetime, 1723–90 (see Figure 1) attested to the

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fact that, with the Poor Law and Settlement Acts, its population was the most mobile in Europe (see note 16). 21. There is a very well-developed, ongoing international academic literature on the history of state, official, and ‘‘scientific’’ systems of social identity provision. The predominant approach here has been through critical histories of the classification schemes devised by officials for censuses and for migration control purposes, or the technologies of identification for a range of medical, educational, or criminal enforcement purposes. A varied selection of such studies include, for instance: Szreter (1984, 1993), Cohn (1987), Anderson (1991, chap. 10), Desrosie`res (1993), Bowker and Star (1999), Caplan and Torpey (2001), Curtis (2001), Kertzer and Arel (2002), Szreter, Sholkamy, and Dharmalingam (2004), Hirsch (2005). Such historical and anthropological accounts have been excellent in analyzing the perceptions, ideologies, and bureaucratic requirements of those officials and professionals placed in a governing relationship to others in society. However, there has been relatively little attention given to the distinct and equally valid questions relating to what citizens may positively obtain and benefit from certain forms of legal and official identity systems, notably from the civil and vital registration schemes that are discussed here.

22. For example, as Scott, Tehranian, and Mathias (2002) show, there have been and continue to be many societies in which the indigenous naming conventions are difficult to adapt to a national system requiring unequivocal unique individual identities to be allocated. This can be doubly compounded today in societies with remote rural or urban shanty-town settlements, where physical addresses are also not necessarily easy to specify. See, for instance, Prohmmo and Bryant (2004) for a case study of a contemporary Thai village in which several distinct systems for defining and enumerating households co-exist.

23. On linking social capital (as distinct from bonding and bridging forms of social capital), see Szreter and Woolcock (2004), reprinted in Szreter (2005, chap. 11).

24. For details of these activities, see www.healthmetricsnetwork.org.

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