This process of “monopolization” is associated with the fact that states must develop the capacity to “embrace” their own citizens in order to extract from them the resources they need to reproduce themselves over time. States’ ability to “embrace” their own subjects and to make distinctions between nationals and nonnationals, and to track the movements of persons in order to sustain the boundary between these two groups (whether at the border or not), has depended to a considerable extent on the creation of documents that make the relevant differences knowable and thus enforceable.
