Humans have managed to store information in different formats to avoid the fallibility of memory. However, keeping track of life, events, and transactions perpetuates a schism between haves and have-nots.

Repositories of knowledge, whether in books or registries, shape human life and preserve our collective memory. Today, databases also support digital money (using peer-to-peer ledgers) and entertainment, among other things. They also dictate people’s prospects from birth.

There are many important analog databases in the world, some of which are ancient. Civilizations developed permanent formats like Sumerian or Babylonian clay tablets, Egyptian and Greek/Roman papyri, Mayan stone inscriptions, Ancient China oracle bones, and bronze inscriptions.

Other mediums were temporary by design: The Romans used wax tablets to write erasable notes and schoolwork, the equivalent of today’s self-destructing digital messages offered by platforms like Snapchat.

Stored data was pivotal early on. One could take, for example, the ritualistic books recording births, marriages, and deaths by the early Roman Church, arguably as a way to maintain Roman power after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

Before ancient civilizations began keeping records meticulously in various mediums, people already used tally sticks made of bone as memory devices to record events, quantities, or messages. Some preserved specimens were created between 35,000 and 25,000 years ago.

The animal bones carved with notches used during the Upper Paleolithic may be the earliest preserved evidence, but these ancient artifacts storing information may already have been used by Neanderthals and other ancient humans. Analog databases, if defined as methods of organizing and retrieving information, could precede our own species.

It’s not a coincidence that most of the earliest known written documents from Ancient cultures are administrative, accounting for a population census and tax records. Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Chinese or Mayan ancient civilizations had the perfect incentive to improve their books: no credible census, no effective taxes.

Censuses and taxation

Fast forward a couple of millennia, and you’ll find how a rallying cry spurred a relatively prosperous population that didn’t trust their administration’s records: “No taxation without representation.” So, what are people celebrating on the 4th of July? Basically, the consequences of a coordinated push to update an old biased database, replacing it with a more perfect “Union” (read: A representative census —or a better database curated and stored locally).

The moral of keeping records for taxation in exchange for representative power got a more elevated, less tendentious explanation. But the “more perfect Union” mentioned in the preamble of the US Constitution was an artifact of its moment in history when Europeans and Americans were influenced by the positive naïveté of the likes of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Their theories of the social contract were time with the rise of the merchant class and linked a legitimate government with the consent of the governed, which formulated periodically a collective “will of the people.”

Though the devil is in the small print. During the Enlightenment, theorists of the social contract and democracy only envisioned one type of citizen with full rights: Male landowners—and Thomas Jefferson, a founding father, didn’t seem to find any contradiction with the fact that the slaves from his Estate were legally considered, before and after the independence, as mere property and not individuals.

Both during British rule and after independence, wealthy slave owners kept registries (read analog databases) of their slaves; the records included names, genders, physical descriptions, places of birth, perceived skills, and health conditions. There were also logbooks and plantation records, as well as recorded transactions and ledgers involving slaves, such as purchases, sales, and maintenance costs. Estate inventories mentioned slaves as one more type of “property.”

Another perspective on the Columbian Exchange

How about the first attempted census of people already in the Americas before European arrival? Reading Charles C. Mann’s books on the topic, 1491 and 1493, will give the needed context to anyone interested in the origins and consequences of the Columbian Exchange, a quite euphemistic way of seeing how things went.

Spanish America had its own databases, conveniently inherited from Roman ones. From the first voyage, Church and State noticed a little contingency in the land they recognized as part of the Far East and, therefore, close to the riches of Cathay (China) and the Indies (India). While the first enclaves in the Caribbean decimated the local population with forced labor and disease, there were debates within the Iberian monarchies (and soon beyond) and within the Church regarding the status of Native Americans: were they “people”? If they were considered as so, they possessed souls, and therefore, they deserved Christian salvation.

There’s a less naive reading of the high-stakes philosophical role of theologians such as Bartolomé de las Casas for the progress of human rights in the Americas. A sixteenth-century Dominican friar and missionary who advocated for the recognition of natives as “people” (and therefore rational beings with souls and the same rights—or dignity—as Europeans), De las Casas and others were crucial in changing old rules for new ones: Instead of letting European settlers use forced labor in exchange for Christian instruction, or “encomienda,” De las Casas thought that free natives recognized as royal subjects could mean more taxes. Taxation in exchange for humanization.

De las Casas’s work, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, was a detailed account of the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the native populations. His chronicle wanted to become a registry, a database to keep track of the drastic population decline.

The story goes that databases were crucial in the Americas during colonial expansion, consolidation, and emancipation from European rule.

Wealthiest and poorest

No ideals escaped from taxation: After the shocker of Haiti’s slave emancipation from France, the metropolis—aware of the incredible economic output of the inhumane plantation system on the island—imposed upon independence a list of reparations for lost property and assets (yet another administrative index).

France would formally recognize and establish diplomatic relations with the new sovereign nation in exchange for the onerous preconditions. Not sure that the new country would bow to it, France imposed trade blockades and diplomatic isolation until a treaty was signed in 1825. Haiti’s “Independence Debt” (300% of the island’s GDP) impacted the country for decades.

And, like something straight out of an Aesop fable, this is the way the wealthiest and most lucrative colony on earth (Saint Domingue accounted once for half of the economy of France, outproducing the entire Spanish empire in the Americas) set to become the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Haiti never developed its own reliable census (the most important analog database in a modern State apparatus). A lack of census data prevented the country from planning an effective resource allocation and undermined the potential for a new taxation system capable of overcoming slavery. The informal economy only benefited a few, which underfunded services and eternalized debt and dependency. It is a sad story through and through.

Ideas about individual rights and the social contract followed the money: With a more powerful urban class unable to access the privileges of the nobility, more and more people argued for individual rights and the idea of popular sovereignty (which explains the bromance between America’s founding fathers and several of the main figures of the French Enlightenment). As nation-states began formalizing the concept of national citizenship, individuals began showing allegiance to a sovereign state and not to a person (the king) or group (nobility) representing it.

But the idea of individual rights carried individual responsibilities, including paying taxes and serving the country in several ways. Soon, a privileged relationship with travel developed. On one side, the “citizens” (European males owning property or companies) could travel freely, whereas those excluded from citizenship were often ostracized and traveled without guarantees.

Letters of safe (and unsafe) conduct

Until recently, only a minority of the world’s population traveled freely around the world, and they often did so, intending to stay once they reached their destiny. Before modern travel, crossing the Atlantic or circumnavigating the southern tips of South America and Africa was a matter of a few merchants, civil servants, and a tiny population, usually beneficiaries of European colonial rule overseas.

Though the Columbian Exchange fostered one type of one-way trip to the Americas: Between 10 and 12 million Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas, fueling the colonial economy. With the collaboration of local African kingdoms and merchants, several European powers benefited from it, and the American Civil War can’t be understood without the differences between the Northern and Southern economic systems: the former interested in producing goods and imposing tariffs, and the latter, an agrarian economy, heavily dependent on slavery and the export of cotton and other crops (and hence opposing tariffs).

Passports are a relatively modern invention. After the devastating Great War, US President Woodrow Wilson promoted the League of Nations to try to pacify the European continent. Following the blueprint of the first modern British passport (1915), the League of Nations issued the first passport standards recognized internationally: A booklet format with the bearer’s photograph, biographic details, and pages to stamp granted (or refused) visas.

Arguably, most Americans who trace at least a part of their ancestors to immigrants coming into the country before the end of World War I did enter the country with no equivalent of the modern passport. But this relative modernity of normalized travel standards wasn’t preceded by utter chaos: For centuries, local authorities issued letters of safe conduct, which guaranteed their safety and were as widely recognized as the prestige of the issuer —An ecclesiastical authority, or a monarch, or a civil servant representing them.

Dealing with population growth and civil unrest

Before passports, there were other less restrictive ways to explore life overseas, either against one’s will or by one’s own adventurous initiative. After Napoleon’s defeat in Waterloo in 1815, he was sent to a remote volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean 1,200 miles (almost 2,000 kilometers) from Angola, in the African coast as a way to make sure he wouldn’t plan a return like he did from the island of Elba in the Mediterranean.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Great Britain—the dominant colonial power—had tried to prevent mass civil unrest due to famine and a growing population, hopefully—or so thought the privileged among society, who were trying to avoid an event like the French Revolution —and the technological emulation of “modern” and affordable techniques for summary public executions: Tales about the guillotine were certainly reaching across the English Channel.

Entire families from the French nobility, taken by surprise and unable to flee, had been decimated during the so-called Reign of Terror (1793-94), including most of Alexis de Tocqueville’s relatives, who belonged to the minor nobility. Other European nations quickly took notes on the events (while actively helping another Revolution: The US independence from British rule, helped by rivals France and Spain). Famously, De Tocqueville traveled (freely) across the early United States, praising its population’s moderate interpretation of the ideas of the Enlightenment.

The Fatal Shore

Those were years of turmoil and experimentation. In 1788, Britain established a penal colony in Australia to address a growing problem at home. Given the rising convict population, many British citizens who were accused of petty crimes (often after stealing food due to sheer misery) and jailed in convict hulks along the River Thames. This cruel human experiment may explain why later generations and modern-day Australians perceive rulers’ overreaction to civil unrest as unfair.

I wonder if the success of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and its film and musical adaptations down under is related to some sort of intergenerational solidarity with the country’s forcibly imported ancestors.

Many years ago, an Australian relative offered me as a present a book by art critic and documentarian Robert Hughes, whom I knew because he had written a compelling book about Barcelona, riding the wave of post-Olympic attention. But the one I got was called The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, which is as epic as it sounds, with characters analogous to America’s frontiersmen.

The penal colony of Australia established several types of registries and databases to manage the convict population and also the limited land and resources: Convict indents detailed names, ages, places of trial, sentences, physical descriptions, and other personal information; muster rolls listed names, occupations, current status, and other details to keep track of the “workforce.” There were also ticket-of-leave registers and pardon records.

Administrative control: Responsibilities without rights

Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore made me understand European colonization from yet another point of view: That no matter the place, during colonial rule, the metropolis significantly restricted the mobility of local people.

For example, in the Spanish colonies, the established settlements, called “reducciones,” gathered indigenous people from the area, to whom travel outside was restricted (to control labor and speed conversion to Christianity). The “repartimiento” and “encomienda” mandated indigenous people to work for landowners and the state.

France favored alliances and trade with natives due to alliances established to fight other colonial powers and fur trade, although their mobility was restricted during open conflicts. In Brazil and parts of current Uruguay and Paraguay, Portuguese colonial rulers often relied on Jesuits’ missionary administration.

British North America favored a reservation system, which the United States assumed after independence. Natives were required to stay within designated boundaries and obtain mandatory permits to leave the premises; in Canada, a “pass system” required natives to obtain a permit from an Indian agent before leaving the reservation.

Across the Western Hemisphere, indigenous Americans faced restrictions to move during and after the colonial period, and some structural disadvantages have created outcomes still pervasive today.

In essence, nothing has changed that much. Now digitally updated, Census data and other administrative databases are still used to establish jurisprudence even in the most remote areas of the Amazon rainforest, where native tribes struggle to preserve their lifestyles as modernity offers the promise of convenience nearby. Almost 450 years ago, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne theorized about the parallelisms between Europeans and the “noble savages” from Brazil.

High speed Internet deep in the Amazon

A recent article by the New York Times explained how the Marubo tribe got high-speed satellite routers provided by Space X about nine months ago, triggering some behavioral changes among the remote tribe; though nuanced, the story was reduced to a meme when media and social networks associated the use of Starlink with addiction to the web and pervasive idleness.

The story seems too tempting for the memesphere to leave it alone: Instead of controlling the few isolated Indigenous groups through sophisticated mechanisms of forcible reeducation, the meme seems to suggest that all you need to do to keep them quiet and dependent is to hook them to the piles of addictive content on the Web. No need to impose Orwellian control (see, for example, the Chinese Social Credit System) if you can offer mountains of digital entertainment, the equivalent of the happiness-producing drug “soma” from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Five centuries on, perceptions of the realities many people face in the Americas have not changed dramatically. It all comes down to how much more complex things are for some people than others, and our data registry methods remind us of some of the root causes.

It’s probably a good day to reflect that it all comes to lucky and unlucky citizens. Passports dictate people’s lives. People who travel and settle elsewhere carrying the right passport are called expats enjoying “geographic arbitrage.”

The rest are your old version of immigrant, legal or not. Immigrants are mainly a positive force in the societies where they move. But it is also the perfect way for populists to amplify the problems and contingencies it causes (there are many) while concealing the benefits and opportunities it generates (there are also many).

It’s a tale as old as the ancient tally sticks, some of which may have already memorialized the first injustices tolerated by any given group.