Before 1914, you could cross most of Europe without a passport
For roughly thirty years before the First World War, most European borders could be crossed without papers. Railways moved so many people so quickly across so many frontiers that governments gave up trying to check everyone, and relatively few travellers bothered to carry a passport at all. The war brought controls back, and they never left.
Travel permits are ancient. Around 450 BC, according to the Book of Nehemiah, the Persian king Artaxerxes I gave his official Nehemiah a letter asking provincial governors to let him pass safely on his way to Judea. India's Arthashastra, from the third century BCE, describes a superintendent of seals who issued passes for one masha each. Chinese officials under the Western Han recorded a traveller's age, height and physical features, and even young children could need a pass. In the medieval Caliphate, a receipt showing your taxes were paid served as a basic travel document.
The word probably comes from medieval Italy, where city authorities gave foreigners papers to pass the harbour or the gates, listing the towns they could enter. In England, Henry V is credited with an early passport for subjects abroad, mentioned in a 1414 Act of Parliament. Noble passports could be vague: in 1791 Louis XVI tried to escape during the Flight to Varennes disguised as a valet, since servants were listed only by their job.
Until 1914 women were usually just names in a husband's passport, and a married woman with her own could not use it unless he was there. During the First World War governments reimposed border checks for security and to stop skilled workers leaving. Britain's 1914 nationality law introduced the booklet and made photographs compulsory, which British tourists of the 1920s called dehumanising. A League of Nations conference in 1920 settled a standard design, and from 1922 to 1938 the League issued Nansen passports to stateless refugees.
Machine-readable standards arrived through the International Civil Aviation Organization in 1980, with lines of characters that scanners can read without anyone typing. Biometric passports with an embedded chip began in 1998, and by July 2024 more than 150 jurisdictions issued them.
Source: Passport
