“Organised Clairvoyance”: Supranational Surveillance and Controlled Borderlessness in H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia

1 Utopian Mobility Control for the Travel Age of Mankind

Over the first half of the twentieth century, H. G. Wells campaigned tirelessly for internationalist causes, co-authoring influential tracts such as The Idea of a League of Nations (1919) and contributing to the foundation of bodies of international and human rights like the UN and PEN. Wells’s commitment to supranational organisation was strengthened during the First World War, but it originated in a series of books written at the turn of the century in which he explored the “consequences of changes in transit” (Wells 1901, 3). These essayistic volumes, which established Wells as a “political thinker” (Parrinder 1995, 100), were followed by the novel A Modern Utopia (1905), in which Wells outlined a mode of supranational governance that he considered suited to the coming “travel age of mankind” (Wells 1967, 45). The importance of Wells’s contributions to geopolitical thought and supranational organisation has in recent decades been highlighted by theorists of international relations (Deudney 2001), literary scholars (Partington 2003), and historians (Bell 2018), and yet, there has been a lack of scholarly interest in Wells’s ideas about supranational mobility control. This essay therefore examines Wells’s predictions about mobility control in A Modern Utopia, delineating how Wells’s utopian ideas anticipate the rise of “post-Westphalian” (Brown 2010, 39) border regimes such as the European Union’s Schengen cooperation.

In A Modern Utopia, crucially, Wells envisioned a “world without boundaries, with a population largely migratory and emancipated from locality” (Wells 1967, 79). This seemingly intuitive combination of utopianism and borderlessness is in fact rather atypical of the utopian literary tradition, in which, as Aaron Santesso notes, one generally finds not “optimistic speculation about the breaking down of borders” but rather the introduction of hard-line borders as a form of utopian “realpolitik” (Santesso 2018, 329). Yet, if utopianism has traditionally “end[ed] at the border” (Santesso 2018, 328), then this is precisely where the utopian project starts for Wells, whose planetary utopia was inspired by the notion that new modes of transportation like the high-speed train would “abolish the greater distances” (Wells 1967, 45).^[1] In Wells’s utopia, travel is in the “common texture of life” (Wells 1967, 43): his world citizens lead itinerant lives of generalised bourgeois comfort and ease. Everywhere there are “convenient inns, at least as convenient and trustworthy as those of [turn-of-the-century] Switzerland,” and the trains are “as comfortable as a good club,” endowed with “librar[ies] with abundant armchairs and couches” (Wells 1967, 44–6; 240). This comfy globetrotting lifestyle represents the main selling-point for Wells’s utopia, but supranational societal organisation is described also as the solution to various “local” issues like xenophobia, unemployment and metropolitan congestion, phenomena that are dismissed as mere symptoms of an “awkward transitory phase” in the early stages of the travel age of mankind (Wells 1967, 45).

Wells’s reasoning may be characterised as “futurological” in the sense that he arrived at his predictions by extrapolating from ongoing social, cultural, and technological developments (Armstrong 2005, 11). In A Modern Utopia, Wells took the rise of European tourism as a foretoken of more widespread delocalisation, claiming that the rest of the world would soon follow the English middle class in becoming “habitually migratory” (Wells 1967, 43). Indeed, the second half of the nineteenth century represented something of a “golden age” of European international mobility (Feldman 2003, 167). Not only was there a “boom in global migration rates” in this period (Szreter 2018, 244), but, in the midst of a “spectacular increase in migration flows” (Fahrmeir, Faron and Weil 2003, 4), European nation-states failed to establish rigorous methods of border control, resulting in largely unchecked international mobility throughout Europe. Moreover, during this period of relatively unrestricted international mobility, British border control was exceptionally lax. In the second half of the nineteenth century, following the repeal of the controversial passport system adopted during the Napoleonic Wars, the British state made virtually no attempt to monitor its borders or its migrant population (Feldman 2003, 167)—refugees “simply disembarked,” without any obligations “to notify the authorities, to register with the police, or to conform to special rules” (Marrus 1985, 19).^[2]

Borderlessness was in other words both a utopian ideal and a rather mundane actuality when Wells wrote A Modern Utopia. Wells’s prediction that the whole world would one day become as “open and accessible and as safe for the wayfarer as France or England is to-day” speaks volumes about his historical vantage-point (Wells 1967, 44). It was not until during the First World War that border control was strengthened to the point that “the idea of open frontiers [became] impossibly strange” (Harvey 2009, 265). However, much as Wells’s utopian ideas are a product of a “golden age” of largely unrestricted international mobility, they also foreshadow the more rigorous modes of mobility control that loomed ahead. Indeed, when Wells wrote A Modern Utopia, the curtain was already falling on the prospect of open borders, and his utopian vision thus needs to be understood partly in terms of the germinal phase of European nation-states’ “monopolisation of the legitimate means of movement” (Torpey 2000, 7), and as a literary expression of an “age of experimentation” in European migration control (Fahrmeir, Faron and Weil 2003, 2).

In A Modern Utopia, Wells expressed disdain for “earthly statesmanship” that had failed to realise that “all local establishments, all definitions of place, [were] melting” (Wells 1967, 162).^[3] Wells’s utopians had, in short, ceased “yapping about nationality” (Wells 1967, 109). This critique of nationalist state-building underlines the pronounced cosmopolitanism of A Modern Utopia—and here it should be noted that Wells’s novel was intervening in a socio-political climate of mounting nationalism and xenophobia. In 1905, the year that A Modern Utopia was published, Britain passed a new Aliens Act, ending its notoriously liberal policies of border control. Crucially, at a time when Britain and other nation-states were on the cusp of bringing about more rigorous border regimes, Wells responded, as Chi-She Li notes, by stressing the “rich socio-political consequences of enabling freedom of movement” (Li 2008, 122). And yet, Wells’s call for open borders was not premised on liberal, anti-statist grounds; Wells wished to do away with nationalism and border controls, but in their place he wanted to build a supranational state operating a global system of personal identification. Wells’s utopia is in other words interesting both as a utopia of international borderless mobility and as an early example of a “techno-utopia” or “utopia of identifiability,” to borrow Nayanika Mathur’s terms (Mathur 2020, 113).

Wells found utopian potential not only in improved communications and the idea of generalised itinerancy, but also in the administrative technologies of identification and surveillance that were emerging at this time. Wells claimed that social delocalisation had already vitiated the “homely methods of identification that served in the little communities of the past when everyone knew everyone” (Wells 1967, 163). In his utopian future, therefore, the world state employs a “scheme by which every person in the world can be promptly and certainly recognised, and by which anyone missing can be traced and found” (Wells 1967, 163). This mode of surveillance—the cornerstone of Wells’s utopia—combines two state technologies that were being introduced in Europe at the fin-de-siècle: biometrics and central registries. When fingerprinting was introduced it was primarily viewed as a forensic tool (Scotland Yard first used fingerprints in 1901), but in A Modern Utopia Wells proposed that biometrics could serve as a method of international mobility control. In short, Wells repurposed fingerprinting as an administrative means of personal identification, outlining how transparent “index cards” containing fingerprints could be used to “give a photographic copy promptly whenever it was needed” (Wells 1967, 164).^[4] Pairing fingerprinting with the idea of the central register, Wells imagined a “system of indexing humanity” that the world state would use to “watch its every man,” likening this surveillance system to a form of “organised clairvoyance” (Wells 1967, 172; 164–5).

Wells recognised that the management of such a global biometric database would “necessarily involve a vast amount of book-keeping” (Wells 1967, 77)—and yet, he suggested that, “colossal task though it would be,” it would not be “so great as to be immeasurably beyond comparison with the work of the post-offices in the world of to-day” (Wells 1967, 163).^[5] Wells pictured a comprehensive informational network consisting of countless substations connected to a central index that would be “housed in a vast series of buildings at or near Paris”—this due to “the distinctive lucidity of the French mind” (Wells 1967, 163). In one of several decidedly lyrical passages about the envisioned administrative network, Wells glories in a description of its main engine room:

A little army of attendants would be at work upon this index day and night. From sub-stations constantly engaged in checking back thumb-marks and numbers, an incessant stream of information would come, of births, of deaths, of arrivals at inns, […] of applications for public doles and the like. A filter of offices would sort the stream, and all day and all night for ever a swarm of clerks would go to and fro correcting this central register […]. (Wells 1967, 164)

Here, planetary surveillance is framed as a gloriously Herculean task, in a proto-Futurist celebration of an administrative system capable of managing an “incessant stream of information.” Wells was not the only political thinker to champion the central register at the turn of the century (Wells’s fellow members of the Fabian Society shared his enthusiasm for such administrative mechanisms), and yet, central registers were generally viewed as a “symbol of oppressive bureaucracy” in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Britain (Agar 2003, 135).^[6] It is hardly surprising, then, that contemporary reviewers regarded Wells’s idea of a planetary database as “monstrous” and “nightmar[ish]” (Mayor 1972, 115–6). In the following section I examine the narrativisation of planetary surveillance in A Modern Utopia, which paints a remarkably unflattering—indeed, well-nigh nightmarish—picture of the global utopia of identifiability that Wells’s novel champions.

2 Illegal Aliens in Utopia

Constituting only a partial return to fiction after Wells’s foray into writing non-fiction, A Modern Utopia does not rank amongst Wells’s most engaging novels. As Roslynn Haynes puts it, A Modern Utopia “makes only a token gesture towards a story,” most of the book being an explanation of the utopian system (Haynes 1980, 88).^[7] However, the slender narrative component of A Modern Utopia is nonetheless noteworthy, not least in that it explores various permutations of identification processes in supranational mobility control, pointing forward to the type of surveillance-oriented narratives that have become increasingly prevalent during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The narrative begins with a mysterious case of inter-world travel: Wells’s first-person narrator—“the Owner of the Voice”—and his friend—“the botanist”—are out mountaineering in the Swiss Alps, discussing utopian societies and the utopian tradition, when they are suddenly transported, through some unknown mechanism, to a planet “[o]ut beyond Sirius” that is identical to Earth and is inhabited by utopian doubles of the people on Earth, a world that, somewhat confusingly, also represents a vision of Earth in the year 2100 (Wells 1967, 12). This unexpected development sets the stage for a story in which these two visitors from Earth gradually discover the ins and outs of the utopian world-system.

The arrival of the protagonists as aliens in utopia injects some much-needed dramatic suspense into the novel, and it also introduces a sense of uneasiness about the supposedly “utopian” system of governance. Indeed, the earthlings are initially wary of disclosing their status as foreigners, feeling “grave solicitude about their personal freedom” (Wells 1967, 31). The narrator muses:

[t]owards the Stranger […] the Utopias of the past displayed their least amiable aspect. Would this new sort of Utopian State, spread to the dimensions of a world, be any less forbidding? (Wells 1967, 31)

These misgivings prove partly warranted: while the earthlings are treated hospitably in utopia, their otherworldy origin effectively excludes them from the otherwise open and all-inclusive world-society. The crux of the matter is that everything in Wells’s utopia revolves around practices of personal identification. This hampers and potentially imperils the earthlings, who have no documentary trace in the utopian database, nor any “bit of a flying machine or a space travelling sphere” to support claims of interplanetary travel (Wells 1967, 133). The protagonist is lucid about their predicament:

The thing of the moment is that we find ourselves in the position—not to put too fine a point upon it—of tramps in this admirable world. The question of all others of importance to us at present is what do they do with their tramps? Because sooner or later […] whatever they do with their tramps that they will do with us. (Wells 1967, 133–4)

Wells’s narrative is in other words more than a pretext for describing the utopian world: it is a suspenseful thriller that revolves around international mobility and state surveillance. The earthlings are not only discovering utopia, they are also trying to avoid being discovered.

The protagonists cannot hope to remain secret very long however, given that the utopian world state has “an eye so sensitive and alert that two strangers cannot appear anywhere upon the planet without discovery” (Wells 1967, 172). They get their first taste of utopian surveillance when they are required to identify themselves in leaving an inn. Acting impulsively, they try to dupe the alien system:

‘Thumbmarks,’ says my scientific friend hastily in English.

‘You show me how to do it,’ I say as quickly.

He signs first, and I look over his shoulder.

He is displaying more readiness than I should have expected. The book is ruled in broad transverse lines, and has a space for a name, for a number, and a thumbmark. He puts his thumb upon the slab and makes the thumbmark first with the utmost deliberation. Meanwhile he studies the other two entries. The ‘numbers’ of the previous guests above are complex muddles of letters and figures. He writes his name, then with a calm assurance writes down his number, A.M.a.1607.2.αβ⊕. I am wrung with momentary admiration. I follow his example, and fabricate an equally imposing signature. We think ourselves very clever. (Wells 1967, 108–9)

Having recorded these bogus identifiers in the innkeeper’s book, they hurry away from the scene, leaving the innkeeper scrutinising their entries and watching them “doubtfully” (Wells 1967, 109). Afterwards, they regret this invention of “ridiculous sham numbers,” through which they have potentially incriminated themselves (Wells 1967, 223).

The earthlings manage to avoid “trouble with the authorities” for some time, but soon realise that they cannot find a source of income without visiting a labour bureau (Wells 1967, 133). When the functionaries at the public office question them about their missing papers and identification numbers, they ultimately confess:

we come from another world. Consequently, whatever thumb-mark registration or numbering you have in this planet doesn’t apply to us, and we don’t know our numbers because we haven’t got any. We are really, you know, explorers, strangers―[.] (Wells 1967, 160)

The utopian officials reject this explanation as nonsense. In turn, the earthlings challenge the officials to “discover the faintest trace” of them in the database (Wells 1967, 160). Taking this challenge as a provocation, the chief official replies almost vindictively:

You’ll get found out […]. You’ve got your thumbs. You’ll be measured. They’ll refer to the central registers, and there you’ll be! (Wells 1967, 161)

As seen, the utopian official pushes back against the possibility that anyone could have eluded the central index. This is essentially a defensive response to an unprecedented and potentially disruptive challenge to the administrative system. As the first-person narrator puts it,

the eye of the State that is now slowly beginning to apprehend our existence as two queer and inexplicable parties disturbing the fine order of its field of vision, the eye that will presently be focussing itself upon us with a growing astonishment and interrogation. ‘Who in the name of Galton and Bertillon,’ one fancies Utopia exclaiming, ‘are you?’ (Wells 1967, 166–7; original emphasis)^[8]

The presence of undocumented aliens in this utopian world might in other words cause the state to doubt the completeness and infallibility of its planetary database.

The protagonists’ thumbmarks are processed at the central registry in Paris and the operators eventually do find a match; curiously, the registry pairs their thumbmarks with those belonging to their utopian doubles, who are of course already registered in the system. However, from the perspective of the utopian officials, this “makes [their] freak none the less remarkable,” since the documentary evidence in the database indicates that the two visitors are actually supposed to be elsewhere (Wells 1967, 168). “‘Here I am,’” the narrator affirms, “‘[i]f I was in Norway a few days ago, you ought to be able to trace my journey hither’” (Wells 1967, 169). The “perplexed” official responds that “‘[y]our case will certainly have to be considered further […]. But at the same time’—hand out to those copies from the index again—‘there you are, you know!’” (Wells 1967, 170). As seen, the discrepancy between the administrative records and the visitors’ presence in the room provokes a resilient “there you are” from the official, gainsaying the protagonist’s “here I am.” Indeed, the utopian official seems to have an unshakeable trust in the veracity of the central index:

‘But here!’ says the official, and waves what are no doubt photographic copies of the index cards.

‘But we are not those individuals!’

‘You are those individuals.’

‘You will see,’ I say.

He dabs his finger argumentatively upon the thumb-marks. ‘I see now,’ he says. (Wells 1967, 170)

This state functionary has clearly grown so reliant on the surveillance system of “organised clairvoyance” that he refuses to believe his own senses and instead privileges the ontology of the administrative system.

The protagonist and his companion feel some “uneasiness about the final decision” as they wait for the world state to solve this “perplexing problem” of identification (Wells 1967, 223; 214). When a decision has been made, the formerly imperturbable bureaucrat greets them with “the bearing of a man who faces a mystification beyond his powers, an incredible disarrangement of the order of Nature” (Wells 1967, 236). The earthlings’ utopian doubles have been located, and the “Standing Committee of Identification,” satisfied that the earthlings are not fraudsters but rather freakish doubles, has remitted the case to the “Research Professor of Anthropology in the University of London” (Wells 1967, 237). Cleared of all suspicion of wrongdoing, the protagonists are free to travel to London without further ado, at which point they are suddenly returned to their own world, having had only a glimpse of utopian London. All is well that ends well, and yet there is a significant disjuncture between Wells’s call for supranational governance and the decidedly Kafkaesque mood of the thriller narrative of A Modern Utopia, which will have done little to relax opposition to official central registers at the turn of the century. Indeed, the tenor of the plot, which highlights aspects of administrative surveillance that are anything but utopian (giving new meaning to the term “illegal alien”), clearly runs counter to Wells’s valorisation of the supranational biometric database as a means of dismantling national borders.

3 Coda: A Modern Utopia and the Schengen Cooperation

Wells’s record as a technological prophet is quite remarkable. Frank McConnell observes that Wells essentially predicted the invention of video cassettes, that he anticipated the use of armoured tanks in war (even claiming royalties for the invention of the tank), and that he coined the term “atomic bomb” (McConnell 1981, 4). Yet, McConnell’s list of Wells’s accurate predictions is somewhat dated (the mention of video cassettes constitutes a rather telling time-marker)—missing is, for instance, Wells’s description, in World Brain (1938), of a knowledge apparatus that greatly resembles the internet (Rayward 2008, 236–7).^[9] I suggest that controlled borderlessness should be added to the list of things that Wells accurately foretold, in so far as Wells’s ideas about supranational mobility control anticipate the so-called Schengen cooperation, an EU-associated international collaboration that has allowed for the opening of borders between the nations in the Schengen Area.

Wells’s idea of controlled borderlessness should in other words be recognised as a pithy and original appraisal of the potential utility of the biometric database. The index system that Wells envisioned in A Modern Utopia is certainly reminiscent of the “large, networked and searchable identity databases” that have come to the fore in contemporary international mobility control (Griffiths 2013, 284). Wells’s description of a global biometric database constitutes a pre-digital example of a “so-called hit/nohit system,” in which “identifiers are fed into the computer and produce a ‘hit’ if the person in question is listed in the database” (Broeders 2007, 80). Moreover, in presenting pervasive surveillance as an alternative to border control, Wells dissociates the concept of mobility management from border control, thereby anticipating how modern-day mobility control is “shifting from the borders to the societies” (Broeders 2007, 73). Additionally, in A Modern Utopia as in the real world of the twenty-first century only those with a “credible and secure identity” may travel freely (Amoore 2008, 28). Wells’s narrative, which highlights the uncertainties and bureaucratic delays involved in personal identification processes, is also highly germane to modern-day international mobility control. Indeed, the earthlings’ situation as unregistered presences in the midst of a fully “indexed” utopian population clearly foreshadows the precarity of twenty-first-century undocumented immigrants.

Wells’s utopian model of controlled borderlessness—that is, the idea of using administrative identification technology to dismantle national borders—is highly pertinent to the ongoing “experiment of creating supranational sovereignty within Europe” (Scott 2012, 84). The EU has harmonised mobility control throughout the Schengen Area by establishing supranational biometric databases like the Schengen Information System (SIS) and EURODAC. The use of such personal identification systems has enabled the opening of borders between member states, thereby creating what is arguably a second golden age of unrestricted international mobility in Europe. However, this form of international borderlessness has coincided with “compensatory” controls at Europe’s external borders, in what amounts to the “most extensive border enforcement program in history” (Carr 2012, 28; 3), the so-called “Fortress Europe.”

Despite the many correspondences, then, between Wells’s predictions and modern-day supranational mobility control, his utopia does not map neatly onto the globalised world of the twenty-first century. In the travel age of mankind, there has been no wholesale emancipation of humanity from the “fetters of place […] life servitude to this place or that” (Wells 1967, 49). Instead we see an increasing disparity between the “extraterritoriality of the new global elites and the forced territoriality of the rest” (Bauman 2000, 221). Moreover, whereas many people do travel far and wide in the twenty-first century, this often constitutes a highly problematic imperative, in terms of forced mobility resulting from poverty, scarcity and warfare, as well as in terms of the deleterious effects of fossil fuel on the climate. Indeed, Wells’s concept of work as a “delocalised and fluid force” (Wells 1967, 153) does not address how a “transnational labour system allows matching of mobile labor to volatile capital” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 135). Of course, the fact that Wells’s predictions have proven partly inaccurate should come as no surprise, especially since A Modern Utopia essentially represents a vision of a socialist future society. More significantly however, there are numerous aspects of A Modern Utopia that belie Wells’s cosmopolitanism; in fact, the stark contradictions that define the Janus-faced Schengen cooperation and the post-Westphalian era at large may be found in utero in Wells’s utopia. Crucially, whilst billed as a portrayal of a global community, A Modern Utopia is strikingly Eurocentric. The description we get of the utopian world is limited to the way of life in touristy Switzerland and cosmopolitan London. Furthermore, despite calling for change in “earthly statesmanship,” Wells is unabashedly imperialist, figuring Paris and London as the main loci of power:

Here—I speak of Utopian London—will be the traditional centre of one of the great races in the commonality of the World State […] for I who am an Englishman must needs stipulate that Westminster shall still be a seat of world Empire, one of several seats, if you will—where the ruling council of the world assembles. (Wells 1967, 243)

This jarring nationalist-imperialist dimension of A Modern Utopia is further accentuated by the position that Wells takes on immigration in his next major publication, The Future in America (1906). Having encountered large-scale immigration up close on his first visit to the US, Wells condemns US policies of “unrestricted immigration” and calls for a check on immigration (or else vastly improved, assimilative education), lest the US should be “flood[ed]” by a “torrent of ignorance” (Wells 1906, 191; 195; 201). In short, it is ultimately control rather than borderlessness that appears to be the priority, for Wells as for Fortress Europe.