Edward Higgs

• DPhil (Oxon)
• Professor Emeritus at University of Essex

The chapter is part of a proposed book on how historically faces have been 'read' to identify people and impute characteristics and emotional states to them. The chapter shows how the current development and application of emotion-detecting AIs needs to be put into the long history in the West of the assumed relationship between emotions and facial...

This paper addresses the question of why state-sponsored medical statisticians in Britain associated with the General Register Office (GRO) and the Medical Research Council (MRC), failed to address the issue of poverty in any great depth in the inter-war period, and why, when they did, especially with regard to unemployment in depressed areas, they...

In recent years historians have taken an increasing interest in the senses in the past, both in terms of how people in the past understood the senses, and how our sensory experience of the past world, if we were placed in it, would diverge from our experience of the modern environment. However, somewhat less consideration has been given to how past...

This paper explores the relationship between the English state and local knowledge over the past 500 years. It argues that until the nineteenth century the central state in England was not particularly interested in local information gathering, except where taxes, land and political support were concerned. Attempts to create a concept of 'England'...

This paper starts by examining the claims that are currently being made for the ability of AI systems to discern the character, including criminal propensities, of individuals from their facial biometrics. Apart from the methodological and statistical deficiencies of some of these studies, the paper also points out the dangers of such digital physi...

Calls for reform of the United Kingdom (UK) birth registration system to allow it to be more flexible regarding subsequent name changes, gender recording and to contain information about 'third parties' involved in procreation are justified and important. However, we need to ask exactly when discussions about the birth registration system in the co...

There has long been a tendency amongst historians to view the Victorian censuses of England and Wales as a problematic source for studying the work of women. This article examines some of the key works underpinning this claim and shows their shortcomings, especially in relation to their extrapolation from isolated local studies to the national pict...

No abstract is available for this article.

In general terms, it is true to say that the history of identification has been written almost exclusively in terms of the activities of the state. A cursory perusal of the standard work in the field shows that Jane Caplan and John Torpey’s edited volume Documenting Individual Identity of 20011 is mainly about state practices in the modern world, a...

As the chapters in the present collection show, the history of the techniques and technologies of identification is a young and vigorous field of research. The present volume is a worthy sequel to Caplan and Torpey’s groundbreaking collection of 2001, Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, and the p...

At a time of ever increasing state encroachment on privacy through the development of intrusive techniques and technologies for personal identification, it is important to place these developments in an historical context. This article looks at why proposals in the interwar period to fingerprint British welfare claimants were rejected by state offi...

This paper looks at the history of identification in England over the past 1,000years. It contends that techniques and technologies of identification do not identify a single entity but a number of forms of personality, including the juridical person, the citizen and the deviant. Individuals can be the bearers of more than one of these personalitie...

IntroductionSurveillance in Pre-Modern English SocietyThe Introduction of Census-Taking and Civil Registration in EnglandThe Rise of the Information State, Imperial Crisis and Social AmeliorationThe Rise of Centralised Information Systems in the Police and Security ServicesThe Generalisation and Integration of Central-State Data Gathering in the Tw...

This article discusses the difficulties in using nineteenth-century census data relating to occupations for the analysis of sectoral labour inputs. The under-recording of seasonal and women's work in the census shifts in occupational classifications, and the systematic removal from the occupied population of women workers is revealed. Reworking of...

The development of technologies of identification has been linked to mobility, urbanisation and anonymity in both past and contemporary societies. This paper looks at England over the past 500 years to see if the history of mobility, urbanisation and identification mesh chronologically. Looking at the legal person, the citizen and the criminal devi...

This chapter explores the history of changing forms of personal identification in Britain over the past 500 years. The chapter explains that what has been identified has changed over time and this has significance. Identification practices have moved from identifying lineages and communities, via identifying citizens, to identifying bodies. In the...

Throughout its history as a social science discipline, demography has been associated with an exclusively quantitative orientation for studying population problems. An important outcome of this is that demographers tend to analyse population issues scientifically through sets of fixed social categories that are divorced from their embeddedness in d...

Book InformationImprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was Born in Colonial India. Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was Born in Colonial India Chandak Sengoopta 2003 234 £15.99 By Chandak Sengoopta. Pp. 234. £15.99,

Changing Family Size in England and Wales: Place, Class and Demography, 1891–1911. By Eilidh Garret, Alice Reid, Kevin Schürer, and Simon Szreter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xxiii, 526. $90.00 - - Volume 63 Issue 2 - EDWARD HIGGS

Is the official collection of information on individuals inevitably leading to the creation of a 'Big Brother State'? In this innovative interdisciplinary study, Edward Higgs takes issue with writers such as Michel Foucault and Anthony Giddens who argue that state information gathering can be seen in terms of an expansion towards modernity, and as...

In the summer of 2001 Channel 4 ran a series of four programmes under the general heading of 'The History of Surveillance', the first of which was entitled 'Victorian Spies'. In this it was argued that in a pre-modern society there was little surveillance of information gathering, by the state, and that the development of such surveillance was a re...

This essay examines existing sociological explanations of the development of the central surveillance of citizens in the light of the English experience, and finds them wanting. Sociologists see the state using surveillance for the benefit of capitalist elites, to reimpose social control over the “society of strangers” created by industrialisation....

In this brief essay we argue that the best efforts of archivists, scholars, and practitioners within the National Health Service have not prevented the wholesale destruction of the bulk of patient records created during the twentieth century. This is a matter of vital concern not merely for historians of modern medicine. Important clinical work has...

On constate une certaine tendance à écrire en termes de religion et de médecine l'histoire de l'instauration de l'état civil ainsi que celle du General Register Office en Angleterre et Galles en application du Registration Act de 1836. Nous soutenons dans cet article qu'il est plus fécond d'analyser ces mesures essentiellement en termes d'enregistr...

This article discusses the difficulties in using nineteenth-century census data relating to occupations for the analysis of sectoral labour inputs. The under-recording of seasonal and women's work in the census, shifts in occupational classifications, and the systematic removal from the occupied population of women workers is revealed. Reworking of...

Historians have tended to treat the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century censuses of England and Wales as social and economic surveys. In this paper it is argued that they should be seen as part of the General Register Office's overall project of data gathering for the purposes of medical and sanitary research. The populations of defined adminis...

The relationship between the state and the use and abuse of alcohol has been a long and complicated one. Alcohol has been seen, at one and the same time, as a product to be taxed, a threat to social order, a danger to public health and an economic activity to be fostered. Differing government departments, with their differing responsibilities, have...