License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport

by Patrick Bixby

This surprising global history of an indispensable document reveals how the passport has shaped art, thought, and human experience while helping to define the modern world.

In License to Travel, Patrick Bixby takes the reader on a captivating journey from pharaonic Egypt and Han-dynasty China to the passport controls and crowded refugee camps of today. Along the way, you

Peruse the passports of artists and intellectuals, writers and musicians, ancient messengers and modern migrants.
See how these seemingly humble documents implicate us in larger narratives about identity, mobility, citizenship, and state authority.
Encounter intimate stories of vulnerability and desire along with vivid examples drawn from world cinema, literature, art, philosophy, and politics.
Witness the authority that travel documents exercise over our movements and our emotions as we circulate around the globe.

With unexpected discoveries at every turn, License to Travel exposes the passport as both an instrument of personal freedom and a tool of government surveillance powerful enough to define our very humanity.

Genres: History, Travel, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Law, Microhistory

248 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 25, 2022

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Patrick Bixby's "License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport" is an interesting book that traces the rise of the document known as the passport. I initially started reading the book, thinking it would be a fact-based and data-driven history of the passport. However, I misunderstood the use of the word "cultural" in the book title. Instead of being driven by dates and data, the book looks at the evolution of the passport as it is interpreted in movies, books, personal anecdotes, and the like. It was a little too subjective for my taste, yet the book is not without value.

Traveling the world, it seems, has always been risky, especially in antiquity. As people started to travel long distances millennia ago, an object or document representing safe passage has always been necessary. That safe passage document, now rendered as a passport, was once optional, but now it is mandatory. Why is this so? This brings us to a subject that the book reflects on at some length.

Bixby explores the rise of the passport, but also the rise of what the passport represents, that is, the nation-state. The passport serves as a proxy for the man-made entity of government. Bixby makes an interesting point about how governments, with all the exclusionary power granted to them, drove the rise of passport, not as something representing the freedom to travel, but something that restricts it. Just ask those who want to travel the world without one.

For those who want to understand how the concept of how a passport is rendered in artistic pursuits, definitely read this book.. For those looking for more facts and figures, you might want to search elsewhere.

[Olwyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very light but fun book on the history of passports and their usages, super interesting, plz Google the only existing picture of Lenin sans wig that exists because of his fake passport
Really interesting for looking at how the role of passports has changed over time and will continue to change
Super fast read :)

[Tara Norton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides an interesting and compelling history of the passport and its role in our lives as citizens and human beings. I learned a lot and thought a lot. Really enjoyable and thought-provoking.

[Chris Langfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I personally couldn't stay interested in the book past the first half or so, I have to give it credit for being what it says on the tin: a *cultural* history of the passport. That is primarily a history of the object as it appears in media. If you're looking for a thorough study touching on linguistics, material history, and a "hard" study of state authority and border controls focusing on this document, this is not that book.

The early chapters touch on interesting features of the historical development of sovereign authority ticking off the boxes of the ancient Egypt, Greece, China, and Rome, then discuss some early modern intrigue in England. The rest of the book was mostly a "romp" through a litany of canonical figures (mostly authors) and their experiences with passports from letters and in novels. This was illuminating to a certain point as the objects of every day life and bureaucracy can give some color and richness to imagining times outside of living memory. However, once I had read about the passports of Lord Byron, James Joyce, Stendhal, Lenin, and Ernest Hemingway, I did not have the energy for Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Trotsky, etc. etc. We get the point.

Some highlights were the rather touching description of Frederick Douglass's escape from slavery (which did involve stolen internal "free papers" and is an interesting story) and his later opportunity to attain US citizenship and therefore a passport to travel the world, and an episode about Mary Shelley arranging for a male passport to be forged for her fellow female author who published as a man (the false documents, of course, lending some credence to the male identity and allowing travel and networking in literary circles).

Overall, a nice casual read, but too many beatniks and Byrons for a historian-philistine like myself. I have to take off a star for the writing style being a bit "filling out the essay page limit". Also, the author earnestly and doggedly attempts to make the book into more than a collection of anecdotes but many of the larger points and comparisons being made didn't quite land and felt beyond the scope of the work.

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book describes how passport serves to motivate plots of various films, stories, and plays, as well as give a history of how passport came to be. Overall the passport is lamented as a device that deprives man of the freedom to go where they want and live as they like.

I feel the passport must also serve some positive function to society? But the book does not touch on that. There is much negative depiction of immigration officers who enforce immigration policy by examining the passport. I would have appreciated a perspective from individuals affiliated with immigration services in terms of how they practice passport inspection. I bet they have interesting stories.

[Joseph · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first part of the book lays out a fascinating story of the precursors to the modern-day passport. The history presented could have been a book on its own. Unfortunately, the whole is muddied with a second part of the book that is aimless, from a political analysis of immigration and border control to a meandering history of how passport processing during different eras and in various countries was myopic, prejudiced, or subject to favoritism.

[Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a bit tough to get into in the beginning, but the history is fascinating. It’s not lost on me the immense privilege I have to be a US born citizen, allowed to traipse the earth largely unquestioned because of the soil I was born on and the body that I am in. Circumstances yield different results for many and this book brought into perspective how the passport has long been a means for limitation, not freedom.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

An odd book but I enjoyed it. Covers the “history” of passports and pre-passport “travel documents” but along with the history is a lot of literary analysis. This kind of thing could have gone overboard but the book is short and mostly very readable.

[Ed P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full of interesting historical anecdotes of people whose lives were affected by having or not having the right travel documents. But it takes an unfortunate turn to the political in the last chapter.

[Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

A little all over the place with stories and examples, but a nice look at some parts of the history of travel. Lots of recounts of customs and border crossing in popular films.

[Jenn Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid, interesting listen. Would recommend

[Shana Yates · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[فيصل السويدي · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

[James Cummings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super easy read with fascinating stories about the world before, and the rise of, the passport.

[Sougeitu · Rating 3 out of 5]

讀到後面知道了為什麼這本書前面還不錯結果評分只有3.2，LOL

[Alex Broughton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greater emphasis on culture than on passports. First 3/4 of the book are pretty good discussion on the nature of citizenship and travel, with an emphasis on artists and intellectuals during the interwar period in Europe. Final 1/4 of the book just seems to go sideways with no clear goal in mind, just random stories about artistic pseudo-passports and ballets.

[Xavi Abante · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with Belgrado Brut, I found this book in the corner of travel books in La Llar del Llibre. It is interesting, and gives funny examples of stories surrounding the passport. Sometimes though, it takes too long explaining situations not passport-related, which at some point seems that the book could have been half the length, explaining the same.