| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Simon A. Cole. Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. 369. $35.00.

Who knows what techniques of identity control will be deployed in the war on terror? The hope is that any such techniques will prevent future terrorist attacks; the fear is that they will be used to identify, track, or imprison a broad range of people, some of whom may well be innocent. Simon A. Cole offers a history of the first such technologies introduced in the nineteenth century to establish the identity of people across time and place—fingerprinting and bertillonage, or the use of characteristic body measurements—as well as showing the link between these and their late twentieth-century counterpart, DNA typing. He inscribes these earlier developments in a broad social history of modernity, emphasizing the breakdown of traditional communities and the anonymity associated with urban life, as well as the rise in a biological understanding of social phenomena such as crime. . . .

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