S5, E5: The Hidden History of the World’s Most Powerful Travel Document

Before you board an international flight, before you cross a border, you need a passport. But how much do you really know about the little book that controls where you can and cannot go in this world?

On this episode of Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene sits down with Patrick Bixby, an English professor at Arizona State University and author of the book License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport, which explores how a bureaucratic document became one of the most emotionally loaded objects in human history.

In the episode, they discuss the passport as a paradox: a document that simultaneously promises freedom and enforces control, that carries the hopes of liberation and the machinery of surveillance. You’ll come away seeing that little booklet in your drawer in a completely different light.

Transcript

Aislyn Greene: Every January, we at Afar, publish a story about the world’s most powerful passports. It’s tied to this annual report that tracks the destinations that you, as a passport holder, can visit without a visa. The more places you can visit without that visa, the more powerful your passport. In 2026, Singapore was again ranked number one and the US, well, it’s barely clinging to its spot in tenth place. It’s been on the decline since 2014, and actually, technically it’s a lot further down the list, but that’s way too much for a podcast intro. So if you really want to dig into that, I’ve linked out to our story in the show notes.

The passport is literally a portal to other worlds, but it’s also much more it’s a physical record, as we know, a symbol of identity and belonging, and it’s a tool of power and control. I’m Aislyn Greene and this is Unpacked by Afar, and today we’re unpacking all of that with Patrick Bixby, a professor of English at Arizona State University and author of the book License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport.

Before we begin, just a note that this interview was recorded in 2025, though the themes are just as relevant, if not more so today. And I’m looking forward to exploring all of that with Patrick.

Patrick, welcome.

Patrick Bixby: Lovely to be here. I’m a big fan of Afar and all of its iterations, so this is a pleasure.

Aislyn: Good. Well, I wanted to start with the origin of the book. Was literature specifically what led you to write this book?

Patrick: Well, certainly it played a role. You know, I’ve had my own share of experiences with passports, stolen ones, lost ones and so forth. So those taught me rather viscerally just how important those little books can be. But as a scholar of modernist literature, that’s my particular bailiwick. I was exposed to the stories of people like James Joyce or Langston Hughes or Gertrude Stein, who were among the first generation to travel under our current passport regime. So they had a lot to say. In some cases about that, I came to understand just how important those documents were for their lives and careers, and how they connected their personal concerns with these broader issues about citizenship and the nation and surveillance and so on and so forth. So once I made those connections, I was kind of hooked into the project.

Aislyn: It was interesting. And we’ll get more into kind of that anxiety of kind of border control and passport, but thinking about those moments where it’s like, it doesn’t seem to matter what’s happening or what I’m doing, or if I’m completely innocent passing through passport is it’s just there’s a little flare of like anxiety. Could something go sideways here? And I’ll get pulled into one of those back rooms?

Patrick: Exactly. Yeah. And so even if one feels completely innocent otherwise, there is always that little nagging doubt. If, you know, if I answer the question wrong. Or if I look at the passport control officer the wrong way, or I make a shifty move of some kind, that this could go sideways without any warning.

Aislyn: Yeah. Or even this idea of like, should I joke around or ask them how they’re doing? It feels like that’s inappropriate in this moment that I should just be very serious.

Patrick: I don’t recommend any witty quips to the passport control officer. No, let them do that. Sometimes they do smile and nod, but I would leave it at that.

Aislyn: No jokes. Well, you do tackle these big questions throughout the book. And again, in the intro you kind of ask, how did the world arrive at this universal requirement? What have the consequences been for us as humans and travelers? So how do you think that passports have impacted us as human beings and as travelers?

Patrick: They are now and have been for more than a century, a universal requirement for international travel. And they possess this kind of strange power, if you will, to tell you exactly where you can go and where you must not. And that sort of restrictive capacity is paired with this sense of, of promise that promises you the opportunity to cross a border, to experience a new culture, to meet new people, to have new experiences. And so embedded in the passport is a kind of a paradox, if you will, between those kinds of promises and the kinds of restrictions or anxieties, as you called them earlier, that are also closely attached with that. So in the book, I look closely at the travel documents, mostly of artists and intellectuals and so forth, because again, that’s my realm of expertise. But they’re also, you know, imaginative or creative people who are responding to the documents in very interesting ways. So I was struck from the beginning just how emotionally freighted the documents were, how much they bore on the imaginations of these imaginative people and and just how important they become over time into our own increasingly globalized epic.

Aislyn: And they’ve evolved so much from these kind of early documents, and then the amount of information on them and the way that they kind of narrow us down as humans to our height, weight, occupation. So can you talk a little bit about how passports have evolved over the centuries?

Patrick: Yeah. The story that I tell begins in ancient Egypt, actually, where messengers were sent out by their sovereigns carrying these little clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform characters, which essentially served as warnings to not get in the way. Don’t mess with my emissary, or you’ll have to answer to me, the king or sovereign of whatever territory. The interesting thing is that if you open up your contemporary US passport, you’ll find analogous language from the Secretary of State who implores whatever passport official or other official who sees this document to treat the citizen, the document carrier, well and not to hinder them on their travels. So that feature is more or less consistent over time. But there are any number of iterations that follow from one period to the next. For instance, in the US in the 19th Century, the document becomes a crucial emblem of citizenship. We continue to associate passports with citizenship, but that wasn’t the feature really before the modern era, post French and American revolutions that the passport took on that capacity. And then, as I refer to as well, you know, it has this function to to track the movements of travelers, to locate them within the world system through various databases and forms of surveillance. So there’s sort of accumulating functions attached themselves to the passport over its very long history.

Aislyn: From your perspective, why do you think as human beings, We’ve needed these because I was surprised how far back the idea of travel documents date. So what do you think compels us to need to kind of codify things like this?

Patrick: Well, yeah, as I say that that function has shifted over time to a certain degree. So in ancient Egypt, the document was a kind of talisman, if you like, a protective object that carried the authority of the sovereign, the king or the Pharaoh beyond the range of their physical presence. So the messengers and emissaries and other officials who carried those early documents had that kind of protective capacity coming along with them. But as the modern era dawns and even as far back as ancient China, you’ll see a variation on this function. the passport or travel document of whatever, sort becomes a means to track the movement of the travelers. This was true on the Silk Road in the Han Dynasty around the time of Christ.

There were registries that tracked the movements from one station to the next of document carriers. The documents at that time even included certain details about the physical appearance and vocation and home and so forth of the traveler. So we became identification documents as well, which continues to be an important function of the document. So over time, that passport in its many iterations has come to serve the personal interests of the carrier, but also the institutional concerns of state governments wanting control of their populations and control borders, entry of unknown individuals into their domestic territories, and so forth.

Aislyn: Well, you touched on the modern passport. Is there anything else that you want to say about the passport as we know it now and how it’s come about?

Patrick: Well, the the modern passport, the passport, as we know it has a relatively brief history, actually, just back to the First World War. Not much over a century ago, when fears about spying and sedition and sabotage and so forth were very much present. So nations across Europe introduced new, stricter border controls during that period, and the documents became part of that border control regime. It was at that time that photographs became more or less universal in the documents. So the passport grows out of this wartime context in the sense of, you know, us versus them and this kind of belligerent or internecine nationalist setting of the First World War. And as we know, the emergency controls that emerged then have remained with us in very much the same form now 25 years into the 21st Century. So there is that kind of residue of nationalism and conflict and warfare attached to the passport as we know it, unfortunately.

Aislyn: I think most people do not think about that when they pull it out and they’re heading off to Europe or Asia. You know, that’s not the first thing that would come to mind.

Patrick: No, that gets sort of lost in history. But one of the reasons to tell a story like this is to remind folks of where these these things that we take for granted and seem entirely essential and natural and given somehow have a history that is embedded in these different kinds of conflicts and competing interests.

Aislyn: Yeah. I wanted to talk about a couple of those examples, especially as they relate to gender and race. One of the stories you mentioned was the example of the Scottish writer Mary Diana Dodd, who adopted a male identity to write, and that extended to their travel documents. With our current administration, we’ve seen a rollback of recent gender progress. For example, in 2025, President Trump issued an executive order that removed the gender neutral marker from passports. So how do you think passports over the years have helped or hindered people from a gender perspective?

Patrick: Well, it’s a very interesting question because in addition to being embedded in these international political matters, passports are very much embedded in these gender politics as well. So as the case that you mentioned of Dodd slash Douglas, these two identities that one individual adopted with the help of a passport, as that case demonstrates, and as the archive demonstrates over and over, to my disappointment as I encountered it, the passport applicant in the 19th Century was almost invariably a man or someone, as in the case of Mary Dodds, someone presenting themselves as a man.

When a husband or father traveled with his wife and children and servants and so forth, their details were on his passport application and on his passport document, a single passport would cover the group, and that convention remained very much the same into the 20th Century, the 1930s even. And up until that point, it was still quite unusual for a woman to possess her own passport, and in the case of a married woman, they couldn’t use the document unless their husband was present. So thank goodness those conventions or regulations have faded away. But they are very much part of the history of the passport for an extended period.

Aislyn: In your book, there’s the idea that passports can be agents of oppression and liberation. So at this moment in time, which direction do you think they lean?

Patrick: I would probably say towards the latter. Overall, especially in the modern era, that seems to have been the trend. One of my favorite stories amongst the many in the book is that of Frederick Douglass, who used a Black Seaman’s Documents to facilitate his escape from slavery. He recounts this in one of his autobiographies, this scene on a train where he’s compelled to present his documents and pose as this black seaman so that he can travel north to freedom. And it’s a remarkable scene, but the story becomes even more remarkable, at least in my estimation, because it was many years after he secured his freedom before Douglass could obtain an official US passport. Although he did try. That was in part because of the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which excluded African Americans, whether free or enslaved from citizenship.

And of course, that’s the first requirement for receiving a passport. At least it was at the time. He was nearly seventy years of age before that decision was overruled. And he was able to get a passport. And he did so ahead of a trip that he took to Europe and North Africa. But he did so not so much for the practicalities of travel, but because it was an affirmation of his hard won status as a citizen of the United States. So the document was very important to him personally because of that status and how it showed that status to the world in the form of this little piece of paper.

Aislyn: Yeah. I imagine he had some very complex feelings about that document and that example that you shared, and the fear and anxiety Frederick Douglass must have felt as the conductor was asking for his documentation. It ties somewhat back to what we discussed earlier, this anxiety that many of us feel at border crossings or passport control. I mean, I don’t want to connect it too much because most of us are not fleeing for our lives and trapped both physically and culturally. But that seed of anxiety can still be present. So what do you think is at the root of that?

Patrick: Well, with Douglass in mind and also Rushdie, who we referred to earlier, there’s this sense that we are vulnerable at the frontier. Now, of course, some of us are far more vulnerable than others in those circumstances. Um, you know, one of the things that the book also speaks to is how that scenario becomes a trope in novels and films and all sorts of storytelling, because it is such a fraught, anxious and vulnerable moment for for the protagonist of these narratives. And that Douglass story in Rushdie’s reflections on it are something that all of us experienced to some degree, hopefully to a lesser degree.

When we go through that ritual of border crossing, when we present the document, we answer the questions, we have the photo taken and all of that, because for a moment, we are relinquishing our sovereignty as individuals to the sovereignty of the state and its authority, and we become answerable to these bureaucratic procedures. They can seem mundane or tedious or even silly sometimes, but they can also escalate to this tense kind of drama. Thus the importance in all these narratives, because we have to at least momentarily deem ourselves as being safe rather than dangerous, legitimate rather than illegitimate. So you do feel like a criminal momentarily, whether or not you have committed a crime. And so all of those emotions anxiety, angst, desperation, maybe relief after you’ve passed through, they all adhere to that document. So it becomes loaded down with those effects and emotions.

Aislyn: Yeah. Especially when you hand over your documents. It’s not just passport control, right? It’s any time you have to relinquish your passport or heaven forbid, you lose your passport, suddenly you are so vulnerable, maybe even trapped. So the passport obviously has so much power. And that segues nicely into my next question, which ties into one of our most popular stories on Afar.com. Every year. It’s a list of the world’s most powerful passports. And in 2026, as I mentioned in the intro, Singapore is again number one. What makes a passport powerful in this context?

Patrick: That is a topic that seems to garner a lot of attention. It’s something I get asked about quite often myself. So there are actually a few different financial firms that rank passport power. There’s the Henley and Partners one, which has Singapore at the top right now. Another quite prominent one is the Passport Index, which is compiled by a Canadian firm called Art and capital. They have the UAE, the United Arab Emirates at the top currently, so their methodologies are slightly different.

But essentially what the rankings measure is how many countries a particular passport can access visa free or visa on arrival so you don’t have to get a prior visa, in other words. And the highest ranking countries, Singapore or the UAE, enjoy that kind of access to something like 90% of other nations. It’s worth noting, and this often surprises people when we discuss this. The US passport currently is around 30th in the rankings, so it’s behind a number of EU and wealthier Asian countries. A total of about 200 passports globally. So we’re top 15%, but not at the top by any means.

And then of course, there’s this massive mobility gap between the most powerful passports and the least powerful passports. The least powerful passports tend to belong to the less wealthy nations, let’s say. Um, and also nations with histories of internal conflict, colonization, civil war and so forth. And really the fear that the holders of those passports won’t be motivated to return to their home nations after whatever travel they’ve engaged in. So countries like Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., whose passports allow them access to something like 20% of the world’s other nations without a prior visa. So it’s a drastic difference between the most and least powerful passports, and has massive implications for where people can travel, where they can work, who they can associate with, and so forth.

Aislyn: How do you think that impacts us from a sense of globalization?

Patrick: Well, certainly it helps those who have a more powerful passport. And there has in recent years arisen a market for second or third passports. So wealthy individuals from nations whose home passport is not very powerful find ways to acquire passports from other nations and thereby increase their global mobility. They can do that by by purchasing one directly, by purchasing property in the country, by attaining citizenship by some other means. So for those, you know, generally wealthy elite who can acquire a second or third passport to enhance the global mobility, it’s great and it opens up all sorts of opportunity for them. But as we know from the migrant crisis on our own border and the migrant crises that have played out in Europe over the last decade and more, many people don’t have that kind of mobility who desperately need it. So the passport is really at the center of geopolitics in many ways, because it is the front line of enforcement for where people can go and where they can’t.

Aislyn: Well, that’s a great opportunity to kind of segue into where the passport is going. Of course, we don’t have a crystal ball, but I wanted to start with this idea that many countries are no longer stamping passports. And, you know, we’ve had some kind of internal conversations about how sad this is that we no longer have that physical stamp. What do you think about that? Is it positive? Is it nostalgic to think that we should have these physical stamps?

Patrick: Well, I tend to share your sadness, frankly. As an English professor and a cultural historian and someone who appreciates printed objects, books of all sorts, including passport books and the analog world generally. I suppose you could say I’m disappointed to see the changes. You know, the stamps in The passport tell a story about where we’ve been. The people we’ve met, the things we’ve done and so forth. You know, I have a whole drawer full of my passports and passports that I’ve collected that tell those kinds of stories. And they’re precious objects in a sense, because they have that capacity, but that capacity is quickly disappearing as everything becomes digital. So, you know, the passport book is going the way of the letter and the postcard and all these other objects and artifacts that are becoming increasingly part of history.

Aislyn: It’s been a few years now since your book was published. So what have you seen change and where do you think we’re headed passport wise?

Patrick: Well, one of the big changes we’ve just referred to, and that’s the absence of stamps. You know, you don’t get when we come to the US in Europe, much the same. So that has changed as everything is digitized. and part of this effort to digitize the borders of the EU and the UK and the US. This is the term they use. Digitizing borders is to enact these new travel authorization systems. So these are something like Visa Lite if you like. So the EU has the European Travel Information and Authorization system (Authorization), which is going to come into effect sometime later this year, which is a means to register travelers who don’t require a visa.

So if you’re visa exempt from entering the Schengen zone, you still have to pay a small fee, you know, get online and register yourself, enter some personal details and so forth. Wait a little while, get the email back. So travelers will have to plan for that going forward. The UK actually just launched a very similar system earlier this month, so if anyone’s planning to go to the UK, you’ll have to take that extra step and make sure everything’s in order before you go. So these increasingly digital means to enhance national security seem to be becoming more and more prominent. And I expect that will continue to be the case going forward.

Aislyn: Do you think that that also equates with enhanced surveillance?

Patrick: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. This is one form of surveillance to register travelers with this additional amount of information so that they can be tracked in and out of the country more carefully, more closely than they had before. And generally speaking, the movement is towards enhanced surveillance. If you’ve been through an airport anytime recently, you know that you’re being scanned in all sorts of ways your fingers, your face, your retina, etc. and those things will continue to be part of the ritual as it’s enhanced with new technology.

Aislyn: That new technology does make things easy, but it also makes me feel uneasy at times.

Patrick: Well, yeah. So the enhanced passenger experience is that sometimes called comes at a bit of a cost, extra level of, of surveillance, of imposition upon the traveler. And, you know, it does feel rather dystopian at times. The amount of information that’s gathered from our bodies and our documents as we go through these frontiers.

Aislyn: I feel more vulnerable and less free in that way. You know, it’s an odd kind of juxtaposition of those two.

Patrick: There are, you know, national security reasons which are always trotted out for these things, and those are real and shouldn’t be discounted, but they do come at a cost. And I think there always has to be some kind of balance between the autonomy of the individual and their information and their bodies, and the necessity to keep people safe by keeping threats away from those points of entry.

Aislyn: In your book, you reference so many cultural moments, you know, books or movies where we as humans are exploring these tensions and these anxieties around border movement. I think a good, more recent example is that Netflix movie Carry On, where, you know, a TSA agent is blackmailed by someone who’s trying to get something terrible through this screening process.

Patrick: Yeah. And so there’s a whole film that’s built around the tension that happens at that, uh, you know, security point checks.

Aislyn: Yeah, absolutely. Well, how do you think that these changes might impact travelers or the mindset of travelers?

Patrick: That’s a good question. I think there is room for optimism. A number of these new initiatives are employing blockchain technology, which will allow travelers to keep their credentials on their own devices, and the credentials are just checked against a database. The database doesn’t actually contain all of the personal details of the traveler. So that’s one high tech way of protecting some of the individual’s sovereignty in these situations, but it still remains the case that your credentials are what matter and that you are checked against your credentials, not the other way around, and that, you know, if anything is amiss in that equation, you are going to have some kind of unpleasant experience, whether it’s a few minutes in the back room or something much worse. So it’s the anxiety that we identified at the beginning of the conversation I don’t think is going to be going away anytime soon. And depending on how one feels about these forms of information gathering, it might be ratcheting up a little bit over time.

Aislyn: Yeah. Okay. Well, I’d love to end with kind of a broad conceptual question. This idea of do you believe in the passport after writing this book, doing the research, looking back over the decades, how do you view the passport now? Because I was struck by how fluid it has been as a concept over the years.

Patrick: Yeah. And as I alluded to earlier, one of the reasons to write a history like this and hope to read a history like this, is that it can teach us something about how these things that seem absolutely necessary to us in our current moment are rather contingent or constructed. They have a history. They come out of a particular set of circumstances which may have dissipated long ago, but they stay with us nonetheless. Um, it’s not that hard to point to a different time in a different way of approaching these issues as we think about where we are now. So the one writer in particular who plays a prominent role in the book and has some very interesting things to say on the topic is the Austrian novelist and short story writer Stefan Zweig. So I was going to read just a brief passage from his memoir where he discusses these issues.

Aislyn: Sounds great.

Patrick: So he says, before 1914, the earth had belonged to all people, went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I traveled from Europe to India to America without a passport and without ever having seen one. When embarked and alighted without questioning or being questioned, one did not have to fill out a single one of the many papers which are required today. He’s writing just before the Second World War. The frontiers which, with their customs officers, police and militia, have become wire barriers thanks to the pathological suspicion of everybody. Against everybody else were nothing but symbolic lines which, when crossed with as little thought as one crosses the meridian of Greenwich.

So there was this period, which is sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of travel at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Century, when passport enforcement more or less fell away. Passports were still a convenience that could help you to get access to places and expedite certain processes. But they weren’t this universal, this unavoidable requirement that we know today. And Zweig writes eloquently about that, that shift, which had already come to seem absolutely unavoidable or necessary by the beginning of the Second World War.

So if I could, I also wanted to read a brief passage from another work of literature. This is the English professor at work. This is from a contemporary Maltese poet, Antoine Cassar, who’s written this beautiful poem called Passport in Maltese. He’s from Malta and the book is published. This long poem is published in the form of a small booklet that looks like the Maltese passport, and then it’s been translated into twelve. I think more than that now, languages and each of the editions is in another kind of passport form. But rather than enclosing, you know, a picture of the holder and personal data legalese of the nation state and all of that, it encloses this long poem, and I’ll just give you a taste of that.

Yours, this passport for all peoples and for all landscapes. Take it where you will. There’s no need for a stamp or visa. You can leave or stay as you please. It does not expire. You can renounce it. It is not the property of the government, Duke or Queen. You may even have several.

So it goes on like that for some 250 lines. And so this little passport like book of poetry becomes a kind of anti passport, if you will. It questions all of the basic assumptions about about nation states, about borders, about who belongs, where, who can go where and so forth that are attached to our, you know, our official passports.

Aislyn: I love it. Yeah. It’s such a fantastic. You should have the two side by side when you travel.

Patrick: He encourages people to do that actually.

Aislyn: So really. Oh, that’s so cool. All right. Well, I’ll have to acquire one. This has been illuminating and helpful. Are you working on any other travel related books, passport related materials at that time?

Patrick: But I do have a project in the works, and this is a bit of a departure for me as a literary scholar, but I’m super excited about it. About the first woman only crew to sail across the Pacific Ocean.

Aislyn: Oh, cool.

Patrick: I happened to know one of the two women. This happened in the mid 1970s. She was my neighbor growing up. She was an English professor too, actually.

Aislyn: Wow.

Patrick: And a scholar of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. So Melville makes sense if you’re a seafaring person. Emily Dickinson’s an interesting. The most isolated and immobile of poets, and I’ve also recently met and befriended the other woman who did this, who’s 95 years of age and living down the street from me in Scottsdale, Arizona, which was a big surprise when I discovered. So we’ve been talking and I’m putting together their story in relation to. She was a professor of drama. So in relation to their professional interests. But this, this journey that they took, which they didn’t know it at the time, but when they got back, they found out they were the first woman only crew to do this particular journey.

Aislyn: That’s incredible. Well, thank you so much, Patrick. I appreciate your time.

Patrick: My pleasure. Thank you.

Aislyn: Thank you, Patrick.

And thank you, listeners, we’ve linked out to Patrick’s book in the show notes. I highly recommend the read or the listen if you like audiobooks. We’ve also linked out to an Afar story about the world’s most powerful passport, so you can see where your country falls. We’ll be back in your ears next week with a deep dive into the history of the World Cup, and I promise it’ll get you ready for that next trivia night.