Centralized databases of biometric records emerged more than a century ago, as states began adopting standardized fingerprint classification systems that allowed them to control mobility, surveil criminal populations and political dissidents, and mediate access to state benefits. Based on cases drawn from North and South America, East Asia, and the Middle East, this panel brings together scholars who are exploring related pieces of this global "biometric turn" in twentieth-century techniques of state power. Dan Ewert argues that in the United States, where efforts to conduct population-wide compulsory fingerprint registration stalled in Congress by midcentury, bureaucrats nevertheless succeeded in collecting tens of millions of fingerprint cards to perform criminal background checks on applicants for broad classes of work and civil benefits. In his paper on the 1931 presidential election in Peru, José Ragas demonstrates how the circulation of biometrically-backed voting cards expanded fingerprinting from a tool of criminal identification to an integral part of political participation and citizenship. Daniel Asen examines how officials in 1930s China attempted to standardize the nation's patchwork of fingerprint systems, a project that reveals the complex biometric ambitions of the Nationalist state while suggesting parallels with the later practices of the People's Republic of China. Michelle Spektor shows how the Israeli Police adapted fingerprint archives collected by British administrators into their own nation-building project, one where the colonial legacy of their predecessors continues to structure citizenship - and those excluded from its full benefits - today.

Together, these papers provide a fuller and more complex history of the rise of biometrics as a global phenomenon. On one hand, the systems of biometric identification examined in these papers were part of a global movement to centralize and standardize identity records in order to make them legible and useful tools for governance. At the same time, the particular political objectives, obstacles, and inherited infrastructures of each national setting produced important differences in how these records came to mediate the individual's relationship to the state. Understanding the evolution of biometric state power requires careful attention to the particular forms it developed in different state projects, where it variously allowed its subjects to claim citizenship and defined those who would be excluded from it.

Given its comparative and global scope, this panel should be of broad interest to scholars who work on political, legal, and social history, as well as history of technology, in different regions. It will also speak to those who have an interest in how global circulations of the practices and technologies of modern governance interacted with the local political dynamics of different national and colonial settings.