Keith Breckenridge is Associate Professor, Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research, Johannesburg Simon Szreter is Professor of History and Public Policy, University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge

a welcome addition to a limited literature ... The editors and contributors are to be congratulated ... on achieving a volume that advances the empirical and interpretative agendas so impressively. Jane Caplan, The English Historical Review

• Foreword1: Editor's IntroductionPart 1 Registration, States and Legal Personhood2: Richard von Glahn: Household Registration, Property Rights, and Social Obligations in Imperial China: Principles and Practices3: Simon Szreter: Registration of identities in early modern English parishes and amongst the English overseas4: Andreas Fahrmeir: Too Much Information? Too Little Coordination? (Civil) Registration in Nineteenth-Century Germany5: Osamu Saito and Masahiro Sato: Japan's civil registration systems before and after the Meiji Restoration6: Paul-André Rosental: Civil Status and Identification in 19th Century France: A matter of state control?Part 2 Registration as Negotiated Recognition7: Rebecca Flemming: Identity Registration in the Classical Mediterranean World8: Tamar Herzog: Naming, Identifying and Authorizing Movement in early modern Spain and Spanish America9: H.D. van Leeuwen: Establishing and Registering Identity in the Dutch Republic - Henk Looijesteijn and Marco10: Andrew MacDonald: The Identity Thieves of the Indian Ocean: Forgery, Fraud and the Origins of South African Immigration Control, 1890s-1920s11: Shane Doyle: . Parish Baptism Registers, Vital Registration and Fixing Identities in UgandaPart 3 Empires and registration12: Ravindran Gopinath: . Identity Registration in India during and after the Raj13: Stanley L. Engerman: Monitoring the Abolition of the International Slave Trade: Slave Registration in the British Caribbean14: Khaled Fahmy: Birth of the 'secular' individual: medical and legal methods of identification in 19th-century Egypt15: Keith Breckenridge: No will to know: the rise and fall of African civil registration in 20th century South Africa16: Frederick Cooper: Voting, Welfare and Registration: The Strange Fate of the Etat-Civil in French Africa, 1945-1960Part 4 Registration, Recognition and Human Rights17: Anne-Emanuelle Birn: Uruguay's child rights approach to health: What role for civil registration?18: Dominique Marshall: Birth Registration and the Promotion of Children's Rights in the Interwar Years. The Save the Children International Union's Conference on the African Child, and Herbert Hoover's American Child Health Association19: Francie Lund: Children, citizenship and child support: the Child Support Grant in post-apartheid South Africa20: James Ferguson: What Comes after the Social? Historicizing the Future of Social Assistance and Identity Registration in Africa