| Summary: | <p>How and why has migration control turned into one of the defining attributes of modern nation-states? And what explains the mode of its practical expression? This thesis investigates the relationship between migration control and state power. I argue that migration control has an external and an internal dimension rooted in the ideational politics of belonging which are foundational to nation-state membership. Related to this, state power has a vertical and a horizontal dimension applying to a states control over its population and territory, respectively. These dimensions are explored and their developments explained through three related essays. First, in <i>Controlling the Marginalised</i>, I compare practices of Internal Mobility Control in the UK, the British Empire, the US, and Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries to show how states controlled groups on the margins of society, especially in response to claims of full societal membership. Internal Mobility Control also has a horizontal dimension as it draws jurisdictional boundaries of belonging which produce conflicts between sub-state units and the central state that demand centralised standard setting and enforcement. In the second essay, <i>Origins of Modern Migration Control</i>, I turn to the external dimension of migration control and explain the shift towards restrictionist and exclusionary migration control in interwar Germany. I propose my hypothesised explanation of racial-political orders as a generalisable mechanism that can account for the emergence of exclusionary modern migration control in other cases as well. In the third essay, <i>Assessing Mechanisms of the Emerging Migration State</i>, I introduce the novel method of Explicit Bayesian Analysis to the overarching meta-theoretical framework of the thesis, Critical Realism. By testing the preceding hypothesised mechanisms against empirical evidence, I assess their relative explanatory power and propose wider use-cases for Explicit Bayesian Analysis within Critical Realism.</p>
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