Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Passports

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

Most people in the world are required to have a passport when they travel internationally.  Today, there is an international regime covering how passports are to be issued and honored between countries.  However, in the past, the system was much more informal, and if you go back far enough, there was no system in place at all.  Learn more about passports, how they work, and how they came to be on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors BetterHelp Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month ButcherBox Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off."  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most people in the world are required to have a passport when they travel internationally. Today, there is an international regime covering how passports are to be issued and honored between countries. However, in the past, the system was much more informal, and if you go back far enough, there was no system in place at all. Learn more about passports, how they work, and how they came to be on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day and tonight.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Before we get into the origin of passports, there's one overarching fact that you should know. A long time ago, actually not even that long ago, people didn't travel very much. much. The average person would have never traveled beyond about 20 miles from where they were born. Perhaps if you were in the military, or worked on a ship or were a merchant, you might get to travel much further, but the average person would never do that. Travel was relatively rare, and if you did find yourself in a foreign land ruled by a foreign

king, you'd probably aroused suspicion. You'd literally be a stranger in a strange land, probably speaking a strange language. This would be a problem if you were on official business. for your king. Someone on official business would need something to present to foreign officials to indicate that they were on a legitimate diplomatic mission. It's quite probable that very ancient civilizations used documents for official travel between them. The effectiveness of these documents was probably due to a lack of general literacy, meaning they were hard to forge, and the use of official royal seals. The earliest recorded use of a travel document actually comes from the Hebrew Bible. In the book of Nehemiah chapter 2, verses 7 and 9, it says, quote,

If it pleases the king, may I have letters to the governors of Trans Euphrates so that they will provide me safe conduct until I arrive in Judah, and may I have a letter to Asaph, keeper of the royal park, so that he will give me timber and make beams for the gates of the citadel by the temple, and for the city wall and the residence I will occupy. And because the gracious hand of my God was on me, the king granted my request. So I went to the governors of Transcendile. So I went to the governors of trans-Euphrates and gave them the king's letters. The king had also sent army officers and cavalry with me. End quote. Reference in this passage is with regards to Nehemiah, an official who served King Artaxerxes I of Persia in the 5th century BC, who was given letters of safe passage to Judah.

And this would have occurred sometime around the year 450 BC. The Ardashastra, an ancient Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, mentioned the use of seals in the 3rd century BC in India, which had to be used for travel, as well as a minister who assigned the seals. The Western Han Dynasty in China, from the second century BC to the first century, issued passports for travel within the empire. These documents included basic information about the person, including height and weight. These passports may have been used as early as the Chin dynasty centuries before. Ancient Rome issued travel documents for travel throughout the empire, and the Islamic

Caliphate issued a document known as a barra, which was actually just a tax receipt, only subjects that had proof of paying their taxes were allowed to travel. In medieval Europe, the continent was split up into numerous kingdoms, duchies, and principalities, some of which were very small. Feudal lords would often issue documents for safe conduct to foreigners, as well as for their own subjects to travel through their territories. These documents were primarily intended to protect the bearer from harm and to control movement for security reasons.

One of the things you'll notice from all of these examples from ancient history is that travel documents were often issued for internal travel, not just travel to another land. And this was often used as a means of control by rulers to exert control over their subjects. In medieval Europe, travel documents were quite common, but they weren't yet what we would consider passports, nor was the term passport yet developed. The term passport was coined in medieval Italy. It was a document that allowed individuals to enter a harbor or to pass through a city gate. The Italian terms are Paso

which means to pass into a port or pass a porte which means to pass through a gate in reference to the gate of a walled city. These documents were issued exclusively to foreign travelers not to subjects conducting domestic travel. The Republic of Genoa,

which was a trading republic that rivaled Venice, issued documents to their citizens who sailed to other lands. In the 15th and 16th centuries, England began issuing passports to its citizens who traveled abroad, and they introduced the term passport into the English language. However, passports really changed, and this is kind of becoming a theme of this podcast, in the 19th century. Prior to the 19th century, passports were issued rather ad hoc by every country, and they were usually

issued in small numbers. One of the biggest things that forced the development of passports was train travel. The popularization of travel by rail dramatically increased the number of people traveling across international borders, especially in Europe where there were a lot of borders. In 1850, this led the states of Germany, of which there were quite a few, to standardize what information would appear in a passport. However, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, passport rules were actually lessened. The power of train travel overwhelmed the ability of most countries to enforce passports, so most countries simply gave up on requiring passports for entry. Passportless travel became the norm in Europe up until the beginning of the First World

War. It was also the case with travel inside of North America. Canadians and Americans could travel freely between the two countries without any documentation. The war ushered in restrictions on travel, which were originally put in place for security reasons, but also to ensure that highly talented people didn't leave the country. Passports during the war period were some of the earliest passports containing photos. In fact, even back then, people were complaining. about the way their passport photos looked. After the reintroduction of passports during the war, they didn't go away when the war was over.

In fact, in 1920, the League of Nations held a conference in Paris called the Paris Conference on Passports and Customs Formalities and Through Tickets. The conference recommended the adoption of a single uniform passport format. This format was a booklet consisting of a cover in 32 pages, specifying details such as the bearer's name, age, and a photograph, which marked a significant step towards the modern passport. In addition to passports, which are issued by governments to their citizens, the conference also established guidelines for visa applications and issuance,

which are travel documents issued by governments to foreign travelers. It wasn't until 1980 that the subject of passport standardization was revisited. The organization that spearheaded the change was the International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO. The ICAO developed the first standards for machine-readable passports. If you've ever gone through Immigrations and Customs at an international airport or a border crossing, you will have almost certainly had your passport read by a machine. In 2007, a chip was added to passports that could be read via RFID or radio frequency identification. The primary information that is stored on a passport RFID chip is actually just an image of the front page of the passport itself.

Future passport technology that's being proposed includes biometric scanning data as well as fully electric passports. And these would be passports that would reside on your smartphone. Electronic passports already exist in some limited cases. US citizens can enter the United States using an app on their phone and tests have also been conducted between Australia and New Zealand. Multiple types of passports exist. Diplomatic passports provide the bare exemption from searches and other forms of scrutiny that normal, passport holders have to suffer through. Individual countries can issue different passports as well, oftentimes with just slight variations. For example, everyone in the United States, except for diplomats,

is issued the same passport. The exception is people from American Samoa. Legally, American Samoans are U.S. nationals, not U.S. citizens. And inside their passports is a brief disclaimer that says, quote, the bearer is a United States national, not a United state citizen. Likewise, there are slightly different versions of the British passport that are available to people who live in Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man, the Crown Colonies. And also, different passports are issued by China for Hong Kong and Macau. Inside every passport is what is known as a request page. This page harkens back to the early days of passports when rulers would issue documents to allow the subjects to travel to foreign lands. For example, the request page on every

United States passport says the following. Quote, The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen slash national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in the case of need to give

all lawful aid and protection. End quote. In Commonwealth countries, the request is made in the name of the monarch, currently King Charles III. This fact actually leads to an interesting result that most people don't realize. The British monarch doesn't have a passport, as a passport is a request for travel on behalf of the monarch. Just because you have a passport doesn't mean that you can travel anywhere in the world at any time.

Many countries require visitors to be approved and receive a visa before they can enter. Having traveled extensively, I can tell you that a visa can be the bane of a world traveler, especially if you're trying to visit lesser visited countries. Getting my visa for Tajikistan was one of the most onerous visa experiences I've ever had to go through. I did a rather complicated visa process for both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. And by the time I arrived in Tajikistan, my visa had been changed to a visa on arrival, rendering all the things I had to go through completely moot. Some countries have a visa waiver program.

This is usually for countries that are more wealthy and have good relations with the visa issuing country. For example, Canadians and Americans do not need to apply for a visa for each other's country. The end result of all this is that there are some countries that are very difficult to enter and some passports that are very difficult to travel with. The number of countries you can travel to without having to apply for a visa is considered the strength of the passport. As of the recording of this episode, and these things do change frequently, the world's strongest passports are, Five countries are tied at number two, each of whom can visit 177 countries, Spain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and France. The number one passport comes from the United Arab Emirates, and it can be used to travel to 179 countries without a visa.

On the bottom of the list, able to travel to only 39 countries without a visa is Syria. Afghanistan and Iraq are able to travel to a whopping 40 and 42 countries respectfully. Of course, passports have pages to document the visas and passport stamps which track entry and exit from a country. I am personally on my third passport. My second passport had three different sets of extra pages added, which is something you technically aren't supposed to do. U.S. passports are only supposed to get two sets of extra pages maximum, but I was in a bind as I was to be traveling up the west coast of Africa by ship, and the embassy in South Africa couldn't get me a new passport in time, so they just gave me a third set of pages.

Many people lament the requirement to have a passport when traveling, and I totally understand where they're coming from, but given their very ancient history, I think passports are kind of here to stay. If you don't have a passport, I highly recommend getting one, even if you don't have any international trips planned. It's better to do it when you don't need it than to get it when there's a sudden deadline.

Passports in some form or another, be they clay tablets or modern books with RFID chips, have been with us for at least 2,500 years. And today, passports are part of the system that allows for over 1 billion international trips to take place every single year. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. Today's review comes from listener Crystalist 38 over on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, Keeping my childhood dream alive.

When I was younger, it was a personal dream of mind to spend my life traveling the world and learning as much about everything that I could. As time went on and the new adventures of a career, marriage, and parenthood came into my life, this dream seemed less realistic. Then I found this podcast. Through Gary, I'm able to rekindle that dream I once had by learning lots of fantastic new things every day, right from the comfort of my day-to-day life. Thank you for all you do, Gary, and I look forward to many more years of learning.

P.S., if I could, I'd like to suggest three topics for future episodes that have a personal interest to me. One, the story of the Lizzie Borden Axe murders. Two, the USS Thresher tragedy and how it changed safety protocols in the U.S. Navy. And three, the City Corp Center and how a college student may have saved thousands of lives. Thanks, Crystalis. As for your first two requests, you'll be happy to note that they are already on the list. The third request is what I assume is the architect. structural problem that they found with the building in the late 1970s when it encountered high winds.

I saw a Nova special on it years ago, man, I will look into it further. If I think it merits a future episode, I will add it to the list. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you two can have it read on the show.