AS BREXITDAY APPROACHES (we assume, at time of going to press) the humble passport is getting more attention than usual. British-issued ones allow visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to all but around 34 countries (passportindex.org), yet the most ‘powerful’ passports are those held by citizens of Japan, Germany, Singapore or the UAE, depending on how you measure.
The documents are such symbols of nationhood that it’s easy to forget they’ve only been an international requirement for a century or so. Although there’s a 2,400year-old mention of safe-conducts in the Bible, and a reference to English passports in a 1414 act of parliament, such early passes were intended for diplomats, rather than tourists. In the late 19th century, the small but growing number of international leisure travellers did not generally need passports. It was WWI that truly ushered in border bureaucracy. The irst British photo passports were issued in 1915, as a single sheet of folded paper (the blue cover came in 1921). The new requirements were much resented, with physical descriptions of the passport holder seen as dehumanising.
Today, around three quarters of people in the UK hold a British passport; many of the rest have foreign ones. The Queen doesn’t travel with a passport, as they are issued in her name, but all other members of the royal family do. Passport number 007 was allegedly ofered to Margaret Thatcher, who turned it down. And the observation that only one in ten Americans holds a passport hasn’t been true for a while: uptake has risen in the past 30 years from less than 5 per cent to more than 40 per cent of the population, as many previously passport-free neighbouring countries now require the documents.
Judge a country by its cover