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What's your point? Passports are essential in todays globalist world. I read once that British people travelling through revolutionary france were incredulous a
by FridayoLeary 1y ago
What's your point? Passports are essential in todays globalist world. I read once that British people travelling through revolutionary france were incredulous and derisive of their insistence that everyone should have a passport. I do believe that the British historically had a much stronger sense of personal liberty as opposed to Europe and you can see remenants of that to this day and that they passed on this culture to the US who are the strongest believers in it.
- heavyset_go 1y agoThe British historically had an extensive travel document system that kept the poor bound to their parishes, feudal relations -> capitalist relations came with changes to internal travel and criminalization of unemployment/poverty to address the want for a mobile, landless and dispensible workforce divorced from feudal obligations. I don't think freedom had much to do with either their passport system or changes to internal travel policy, they were used to enforce relations even through the transition from feudalism to capitalism. There was certainly rhetoric about liberty regarding passport reform among thinkers and the mercantile class later in London, Adam Smith talks about it in The Wealth of Nations, but I would not say there is a history of a liberatory British passport system.
- FridayoLeary 1y agoThe insinuation that passports are bound up in oppression and hierarchy is silly. Maybe historically they had that element but that has long fallen away. At most the modern system is built on the dead remains of an older system but has no connection to it. The current digital id being proposed otoh is definitely designed to erode freedom...