Studying these micro‐policies and the materiality of identification in local contexts is considered a privileged inroad to studying how underlying power relationships influence and solidify in different types of institutions and transpire through society on a daily basis via discourses and practices. It also allows for incorporating approaches that consider the importance of capital, ideology and human choice in connection with non‐human elements – ranging from city walls and the physical layout of cities to passports and registers of newcomers – and look for the networks or assemblages in which all these elements are interconnected.

Our conference will address long‐term transformations in micro‐policies of identification and incorporation of newcomers as a next step in developing a new approach to the history of migration policies as an integral part of the social and political fabric of cities. Our book will take into account multiple institutional levels and different types of agency so as to develop new perspectives on long‐term transitions from the pre‐modern to the modern city. We consciously strive for a comparative perspective on European cities in the past five centuries that allows to take into account the role of regional diversity, temporal changes and differences between distinct types of cities (politically, economically and demographically). We aim to collect papers on the following items:

1/ What were the changing and shifting principles to distinguish migrants and to evaluate their roles and places within the urban community in its different dimensions, including work, residence, poor relief, education, urban rituals etc.? How did urban authorities deal with the growing ambitions of the (supra)national state to control and monitor geographical mobility and how did the relative autonomy of cities towards immigrants evolve in relation to shifting conceptions of territory and boundaries through time and space?

2/ Which material and technical instruments were used to identify migrants? Which kinds of identity documents (domestic and international passports, birth and marriage certificates, residence and work permits, relief certificates, certificates of racial origins,etcetera) did migrants carry with them when moving to cities? How protective or repressive was the effect and use of these identification documents for the migrants involved? How did these uses of papers evolve through time? And how did this relate to different regimes and conceptions of membership of urban communities?