In the 1990s, James Scott, a professor at Yale, sat down to write a book addressing a puzzling question: Why does the state hate people who move around? Nomads, gypsies, Irish Travelers, Bedouins, vagrants, homeless people, runaway slaves, all had been considered “a thorn in the side of states” who have tried and failed to pin them down. But the more Scott tried to write that book, the more he realized he should be writing a different one, about how the state came to nail down its people in the first place.
