The History of Anthropometry and Fingerprinting in Colonial South Asia
The History of Anthropometry and Fingerprinting in Colonial South Asia
- Mira Rai WaitsMira Rai WaitsDepartment of Art History, Appalachian State University
Summary
In the late 19th century, an obsession with identifying and classifying people emerged in the West. Efforts to develop lines of inquiry to support this obsession were common; visual technologies were harnessed and invented to further the acquisition of knowledge about human identity and classification. Anthropometry, the measurement of the human individual to understand physical variation, was used as the foundation for Bertillonage, a system designed to identify recidivists through a standardized collection of images and data sets about the human body. Consequently, anthropometry came to be associated with broader efforts to manage crime in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as law enforcement touted the potential of visual technologies and their related archival systems as mechanisms for improving criminal identification.
This interest in visual technologies and criminal identification coupled with the colonial exploration of South Asia in the 19th century led to anthropometric studies of South Asian peoples. Some of these studies were tied to institutions of colonial law enforcement, such as the police or prison system, but others, including the late 19th-century study of the people of the Andaman Islands, demonstrate how the broader obsession with human identification and classification was tied to efforts to study race as a measurable subject. Colonial civil servants also turned to visual technologies for assistance with the management of colonial subjects. In 1858, Sir William James Herschel, the chief administrator of the Hooghly district of Bengal, after observing a native practice where fingermarks were used as marks of authenticity for the illiterate, began to experiment with taking handprints and fingerprints as identifying images. Scottish doctor Henry Faulds had contemporaneously expressed a similar interest in studying fingerprints after observing sample prints on ancient pottery while serving as a medical missionary in Japan. Herschel shared his findings with Sir Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, who, after reviewing Herschel’s findings, posited that fingerprints were permanent visual markers of identity. Following this observation, Sir Edward Richard Henry, inspector-general of police of Bengal, along with police sub-inspectors Chandra Bose and Azizul Haque, developed a classification system for using fingerprints to identify recidivist criminals. This system was exported from colonial India to Britain and then on to police organizations globally.
Subjects
- Art and Architecture
- Central Asia
- Postcolonial Studies
- South Asia
The Origins of Identity Sciences
In the late 19th century, identity sciences such as anthropometry, the measurement of the human individual to understand physical variation, and dactylography, the study of fingerprints, were invented and refined. These sciences owe their origins to a widespread obsession with human identification and classification among leading thinkers within 19th-century Western society. New fields of study such as anthropology and its related branch of ethnography bolstered the development of identity sciences. In the mid-19th century, ideas about the existence of social types, including criminal types, became popular, along with the related belief that such types could be observed through various bodily features.1 Meanwhile, Western colonial expansion across the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the 19th century also dramatically impacted the growth of such sciences as British colonizers grappled with the socio-cultural politics of colonial encounter, seeking out ways to make sense of the people and places they aspired to control.2 The entanglement of anthropology and its related fields with colonial endeavor engendered beliefs about cultural difference as biologically determined and an observable fact of life. A race-based typology was forged, propagated by the theories of 19th-century liberalism.3
Technological advances, specifically in terms of image-making and the rapid spread of images, further contributed to the social investment in identity sciences, since the project of studying human identification and classification now could be supported by a broad range of visual evidence. Visual information, disseminated by technologies such as photography and the illustrated press, was hailed as a profound advancement in the acquisition of knowledge.4 Indeed, the 19th century was a century in which the study of the visible world was equated with the search for truth; visibility, in other words, offered the promise of legibility and knowledge. Against this backdrop, the practices of anthropometry and fingerprinting were cultivated as potential mechanisms for harnessing visual information to categorize, identify, and control people in the Indian colony. Particularly within the realm of law enforcement, bodily measurements began to be taken and systematically organized as visual evidence to help police forces identify criminal reoffenders. Therefore, the Indian subcontinent, while under British colonial rule, can be seen as a laboratory for experimenting with anthropometric and fingerprint systems, and in the case of colonial fingerprinting , the experiments undertaken in South Asia determined the future of identity sciences around the world.
Photography, Colonialism, and Criminality
When the daguerreotype was presented to the world at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1839, it ushered in a paradigm shift with respect to the public’s relationship to images and systems of image-making.5 Early photographic practices were represented as “art-science,” having seemingly “scientific” attributes including the physical technology of the camera itself, the chemical process of development, and the photographic system’s relationship with its referent.6 Not only did early photography produce a seemingly accurate representation of its subjects, but photography’s “indexicality,” or the fact that a referent (subject) must exist when taking a photograph, positioning photography as index or sign of its subject, also implied that images and image-making in the 19th century were radically different than in centuries prior.7 Western colonial expansion in the 19th century proved to be the perfect catalyst for the spread of technologies such as photography. Colonists approached the camera as an imperial tool in their exploration and colonization of South Asia. When aligned with the nascent field of anthropology and its related branches, photographic images were presented as a form of data collection, and photography was thus rendered an apparatus of knowledge dissemination, lending credibility in the form of visual evidence to the study of human societies and culture.8 Likewise, photography’s application as apparatus within law enforcement systems of criminal identification in the second half of the 19th century informs its later entanglement with anthropometry and fingerprinting.

Figure 1. “Sonthal,” The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations, with Descriptive Letterpress, of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan, originally prepared under the authority of the government of India.
A massive mid-19th-century photographic project illustrates photography’s early connection to colonial anthropology in British India. Photomechanical systems of reproduction had been brought from Europe to India in the 1840s, and photographic societies were rapidly established in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras in support of this new medium.9 Lord Charles Canning, who governed India during the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857–1858 as governor-general and as viceroy when the British Raj was established in 1858, was, along with his wife Lady Charlotte Canning, an avid proponent of photography; at the conclusion of the Cannings’ tenure in India they planned to return to England commemorating their time abroad with a private collection of photographs of the Indian subcontinent.10 Lord Canning encouraged civilians and members of the British army to take photographs while traveling around South Asia in support of this endeavor.11
In 1863, these photographs, specifically photographs of South Asian people, began to be collated into a collection that would later be published as an eight-volume work titled The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations, with Descriptive Letterpress, of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan (1868–1875). This multi-volume work included 470 albumen photoprints along with letterpress descriptions of the different photographed subjects. The short descriptions incorporated data derived from official reports on the different groups represented to offer insights into Indian society and culture. The images themselves were idiosyncratic; there was no standard system of framing; rather, the images are inconsistent in their visual appearance with respect to the number of people photographed, the locations of the photographs, and the positions of the sitters. Nevertheless, The People of India adopted a scientific tone in its documentation of different castes, occupations, and socio-cultural groups so that the British India Office could maintain a knowledge repository about their colonial subjects. In the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion, which had rattled British colonists’ confidence with respect to their relationship with colonial subjects, the publication of The People of India also gestured to colonists’ broader anxiety concerning their subjects’ propensity to rebel as well as their related commitment to studying the same subjects to prevent future discord.12
In purporting to visualize the people of South Asia this project also reveals how the subject of identity, in this case identity as a socio-cultural colonial construction rather than an awareness of the photographed sitters as individuals, was increasingly tied to image production in the second half of the 19th century. For example, the first photoprint in The People of India of a “sonthal” man is strategically placed as an entrée into the project to assuage colonial anxieties that stemmed from the events of the prior decade (figure 1). When The People of India was published, British colonists distrusted the Santhals, a tribal community from Bengal. The Santhal Rebellion of 1855–1856, like the Sepoy Rebellion that took place a year later, had fractured colonists’ confidence in their governance of South Asian people, since the Santhals were rebelling against the British East India Company’s land revenue system.13 The People of India entry was meant to dispel fears about the Santhals by offering up mundane facts and visuals for colonial readers. The photoprint, a front-facing portrait of a middle-aged man, reveals only his face and bare shoulders; the image is devoid of a background or any other unique signifiers about the man or his location. Likewise, the accompanying description makes no reference to the man as an individual—his name is never mentioned—rather the text discusses the Santhals as a “race” and elaborates on such topics as the Santhals’ physical appearance, diet, dress, religious practice, and hunting expertise. As an index of a living Santhal man, including the photoprint was supposed to legitimize the observational narrative—the image, in other words, serves as proof of the existence of a tribal population. In suggesting that knowledge about the Santhals could be obtained through the reading of a text and the viewing of a photoprint, The People of India gestures to a growing belief concerning the effectiveness of using visual technologies like photography as potential tools of categorization, identification, and control.
Photography’s application as a means of documenting South Asian people, particularly people the British colonists distrusted, also portends its application as a tool for law enforcement institutions and criminal identification in the second half of the 19th century. In the late 1870s, an intellectual school of criminal anthropology arose organically around the ideas of Italian psychologist Cesare Lombroso, who theorized that criminality was not circumstantial but rather biological and therefore observable through bodily features.14 Lombroso and his disciples’ ideas were quite impactful, and a newfound interest in studying the bodies of criminals became commonplace around the world particularly within law enforcement institutions, such as the police and modern prison systems—institutions, which like photography, were also developed in earnest in the 19th century. Photography, as it had in anthropological studies of the people of South Asia, offered the promise of visual evidence to further the field of criminal anthropology. Prominent surgeon, Norman Chevers foreshadowed additional possibilities for applying photography as a tool in police or medical investigation in British colonial India in his 1870 A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for India.15 Indeed, the same attributes that enabled photography to be seen as an “art-science” appealed to members of law enforcement in the second half of the 19th century, who were keen to take advantage of the technological advances of photographic image-making as well as photography’s cost-effectiveness and ease of operation/production by incorporating visual evidence into investigations.16

Figure 2. “Specimens of Composite Portraiture.”
In the 1870s and 1880s, Sir Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics whose later study of fingerprinting played a crucial role in the ascendance of fingerprinting as an identity science, experimented with photography as a potential tool in support of his studies of human heredity. Prior to his work on fingerprinting, Galton grappled with an unusual mode of photo-mechanical reproduction to see if he could make visible physical criminal traits. Galton made composite portrait photographs (produced when multiple exposures are developed on a single frame) of different murders, felons, and sex offenders in an attempt to uncover common physiological features among like criminal types (figure 2).18 A pseudoscientific practice certainly, Galton’s experimentation with composite photography nevertheless demonstrates how widespread the conviction that photography could somehow be put to use in explicating crime was. Ultimately, it was not Galton’s composite photographs but the police “mugshot,” standardized by Alphonse Bertillon, which would come to be synonymous with photography’s important contribution to the study and management of criminality.
Experiments with photomechanical reproduction as a tool for exploring identity, either as a means of documenting people during colonial encounter or labeling or managing people understood to be “criminal,” shaped future directions in the development of identity sciences in South Asia and beyond. Photography was incorporated into anthropometric studies led by Western researchers interested in furthering what could be known about colonial subjects. When photography failed to live up to its perceived potential, law enforcement officials used photography’s successes and failings as a metric by which to judge the validity of future systems of identification.
Bertillonage and Colonial Anthropometry
While the taking of bodily measurements existed in various forms before the 19th century, anthropometry’s ascendence as an identity science apparatus occurred in the late 19th century when it was both refined and brought into the service of law enforcement and harnessed to study racial differences in colonial spaces. Beginning in the late 18th century, experiments with measuring the human body resulted in various pseudoscientific branches of knowledge focused on studying different bodily parts. These branches included phrenology, the measurement of personality and character through examination of the cranium; craniometry, or the study of skull size, weight, and shape; and physiognomy, the study of facial features and expression to reveal the psychological and moral qualities of the individual. In the 21st century, these branches of so-called knowledge, including anthropometry, have been devalued for their problematic origins and lack of useful knowledge. However, in the late 19th century, the combined force of Lombroso’s popular criminal anthropology and theories of scientific racism, or the conviction that a hierarchy of human “races” exists that is evidence-based, significantly raised anthropometry’s profile across the globe, resulting in the production of numerous studies that purported to transform the human body into evidence via measurement.
Anthropometry’s application within the domain of law enforcement can be attributed to one individual, French police officer Alphonse Bertillon. In 1879 Bertillon joined the Paris Prefecture of Police. Paris in the 1880s was a city marked by class struggles; Bertillon was convinced that the working class’s reliance on falsified documents was a rampant problem, and was similarly attuned to debates concerning the issue of urban recidivism.19 Bertillon observed that the police had produced a vast repository of images of Parisian criminals but that there was no systematic way for the police to put those photographs to use either to identify criminals or classify them.20 He went to work developing what he described as a “signaletic” system of identification; the police would collect data related to the human body adhering to a standardized system of collection and reportage, which included taking eleven anthropometric measurements of parts of the suspected criminal’s body as well as a frontal photograph of the full face and one in profile that together would become the prototype for the “mugshot” (figure 3).21 The body, in Bertillon’s system that became known as Bertillonage, was evidentiary, but unlike earlier photographic studies made to emblematize human socio-cultural types or races, Bertillon hoped to use the data and images he collected to individuate the body.22 Furthermore, he encouraged this collection of data and images not to uncover criminal physiological features—for Bertillon there was no inherent visual expression of criminality—rather, the details collected about a suspected criminal’s body would serve to explicate that body’s individual history, transforming the body into a record of the person.23 In collecting so much information on the body, Bertillon believed this new system would prevent criminals from using false aliases so that police could turn to their archival database of photographs and human measurements when a suspected repeat offender was in custody as a means of confirming prior arrests or criminal records, thereby bringing more criminals to justice and streamlining the workings of the police. His system was officially incorporated into the Paris police in 1883 and then was exported to other policing systems around the world.24 In the late 19th century, anthropometry went on to become the dominant identification technology with men such as Galton recommending its use.

Figure 3. Alphonse Bertillon, “Instructions Signaletiques,” 1893 Wellcome Collection.
For colonial officials in South Asia, the development of a systematic mode of organizing and even taking photographs was already a pressing concern prior to the global export of Bertillonage, which systemized recording bodily measurements along with an individual’s photograph. Improved photographic practices were required in order to bolster the theories of scientific racism by producing more coherent evidence that could illustrate the visual characteristics of different racial types. In the late 1860s, Thomas Henry Huxley and John Lamprey both separately developed photographic systems for regulating anthropological photography within British colonies.25 Huxley’s system was the more cumbersome of the two; Huxley recommended photographing colonial subjects in the nude, adhering to a standard camera distance from the subject, set poses, and the taking of two photographs—a frontal and profile view, not altogether dissimilar from Bertillon’s “mug-shot.”26 To glean valuable data from the photographs, Huxley recommended placing a vertical anthropometer, a calibrated instrument of measure, within the pictorial frame, but the anthropometer proved to be the undoing of Huxley’s system as it was inconsistently placed, and this, coupled with the lack of information concerning the poses, made the system impractical.27 Lamprey’s system, by contrast, did away with the anthropometer and instead relied on a grid system that would become known as “Lamprey’s Grid,” wherein a silk thread was hung on a wooden frame and then placed in front of a black screen. The thread would create 2-inch squares so that the features of the subject could be measured against the background. Lamprey’s subjects were still to be photographed in the nude with both a frontal and a profile view, but the grid simplified the process. Ultimately, neither of these systems would fully fulfill the perceived promise of photography to produce useful data to categorize, identify, and control people, but Huxley’s and Lamprey’s systems introduced a photographic formula—nudity, two views of the subject, and seemingly scientific devices within the photograph—that would be applied to anthropometric exercises within colonial space.

Figure 4. “‘Riala,’ man of the ‘Aka Kede Tribe,’ middle Andaman; age about thirty-five years” by Maurice Vidal Portman and William Molesworth, 1890.
Perhaps the most extensive exploration of anthropometry in colonial South Asia occurred on the Andaman Islands, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where an indigenous population resided that was hostile to British colonists who had established a permanent settlement in the islands at Port Blair in 1858.28 British colonists, particularly anthropologists, saw the Andamanese as an ideal case study, deserving of in-depth investigation. Not only did they depict the Andamanese as a dying race in need of saving or, at the very least, in need of preserving for museological purposes, but they were also able to configure their representation of the Adamanese way of life as evidence that colonial subjects remained in a state of infancy or childhood when compared to the modernized lives of people in Western nations.29 While other colonists had photographed the Andamanese in the second half of the 19th century, Maurice Vidal Portman (the British officer in charge of the Andaman Islands from 1879 to the end of the century) fastidiously photographed the Andamanese from 1890 to 1895, producing hundreds of photographs that he framed as ethnographic specimens.30 Many photographs of the Andamanese were taken in the nude, in front of Lamprey Grids with their body parts extended by anthropometers, or taken to capture frontal and profile views similar to a “mugshot’s” framing (figure 4). Additionally, Portman, along with Indian Medical Service doctor William Molesworth, put together a collection in 1894 titled Observations on External Characters, which is the most elaborate example of a singular study fusing anthropometry and racial bias done on the Andamanese people. This study of more than two hundred Andamanese, fueled by the documentary logic of anthropometry, records measurements, bodily descriptions, and even incorporates tracings of the subjects’ hands and feet. There are many ways of reading and analyzing this work. Not only were the Andamanese sexualized through a homoerotic lens within the study, but Portman also positioned himself as the savior of a race of people in the dissemination of this work.31 As an obsessive experiment in human identification and classification, this study also signals to the ways in which the British colonial government forced people to be subjected to systems of inscription that were typically put to use only when dealing with criminals.
By the 1890s, anthropometric systems inspired by Bertillonage had also been implemented within the realm of law enforcement in British colonial India. British colonists were threatened by people who did not conform to their standard view of a social order and saw visual technologies as mechanisms that could support the documentation and surveillance of unfamiliar social groups.32 The publication of The People of India had revealed colonists’ commitment to using visual technologies in an attempt to understand colonial subjects by generating racial typologies. While this colonial interest in types was certainly related to law enforcement’s turn toward visual technologies, the colonial Indian police, which was formed in 1860, introduced anthropometric systems to identify recidivists and address the problem of habitual criminality in South Asia. Bertillonage promised a systematic mode of archiving criminals, and police forces across the different colonial Indian presidencies published guides on anthropometry’s application.33 In the Bengal presidency, for example, Bertillonage was adapted so that six measurements were taken instead of eleven, and the important addition of a thumb impression of a suspected criminal’s left thumb was included in the anthropometric record.34
Anthropometric systems were still used through the 1920s. However, in British colonial India, fingerprinting replaced anthropometry very early, even before the 20th century. Some of the critiques of anthropometry included its potential for human error since the degree of consistency across anthropometric measurements was contingent on the skill of those taking the measurements, its costliness since numerous measurers needed to be hired for the system to work, and its management since a significant amount of data was produced that could be difficult to store as well as read given the lack of literacy across India’s police force. Ultimately, this history of colonial anthropometry in South Asia can be said to have influenced law enforcement’s investment in visual data, portending the eventual adoption of fingerprinting as a critical part of policing.
Herschel, Faulds, and Fingerprinting
There is no clear anthropological moment when fingerprinting begins. However, fingerprints appear on ancient pottery and cave paintings in Asia, Europe, and North America.35 Documents from 7th-century China exist that use the fingerprint as a seal, suggesting humanity has a long history of viewing the patterns on fingers as characteristic of individuality.36 In Europe, attention to fingerprints does not appear until the late 17th century and early 18th century, but ideas about the potential use of fingerprinting as an identity science arose in the 19th century within colonial space, unlike anthropometry, which was exported from the West to Europe’s colonies.
Two historical figures’ names have been linked together when exploring the origins of fingerprinting as an identity science in the 19th century—Sir William Herschel was a member of the Indian Civil Service who started taking handprints and fingerprints from South Asian colonial subjects in 1858 , and Henry Faulds, a Scottish doctor working in Japan in the 1870s, who explored the potential value of fingerprinting after examining fingermarks on ancient Japanese pottery. The question of who deserves the attribution as the so-called discoverer of fingerprinting has been long debated, but more important than the original “discoverer” is an understanding of the colonial origins of the practice.37
Herschel, the chief administrator of the Hooghly district of Bengal, dated his discovery of fingerprinting to 1858 when he was posted in the city of Jangipur to supervise the construction of roads. While working with a local Bengali contractor, Rajyadhar Konai, who had been hired to supply the building material for the roads, Herschel requested that Konai provide an ink impression of his right hand to the already signed contract, wherein Konai had agreed to provide 2000 maunds of road-metaling material in exchange for payment.39 The handprint Konai affixed to the contract recorded Konai’s five fingers, the various joints of the fingers, as well as the papillary ridges of the skin from his palm (figure 5).40 Herschel’s request was a curious ask, but not altogether surprising given the climate of distrust British colonists experienced after the events of the Sepoy Rebellion and earlier rebellions, particularly concerning the subject of documentation.41 In his 1916 monograph about fingerprinting, Herschel claimed that by having Konai affix a handprint he hoped to “frighten Konai of all thought of repudiating his signature hereafter.”42 Herschel’s reflections situate his decision within the broader 19th-century obsession with the visual as a legible source of knowledge and agent of control. Herschel’s awareness of a local practice known as tep-sai also seems to have informed his decision to add the handprint to the contract. Tep-sai was the mark of authenticity on letters and documents for the illiterate in Bengal prior to British arrival . Herschel reprinted an example of tep-sai in his monograph, which shows the tip of a fingerprint made from ink. Herschel’s interest in handprints/fingerprints at this point was not driven by a belief that somehow these fingerprints could be used to verify identity—although he later became interested in the idea of ridge patterns—rather, he turned to the handprint/fingerprint image as a further means of authenticating the relationship between colonial officials and subjects.43
After his time in Jangipur, Herschel moved in 1860 to the district of Nadia, the center of the Indigo Rebellion of 1859—another mid-19th-century rebellion that stemmed from deep-seated frustrations with colonial governance in South Asia. The point of discord that sparked these events concerned native peasants’ (ryots) refusal to grow indigo for unjust European landholders (zemindars). While in Nadia, Herschel continued to doggedly experiment with capturing handprints and later moved on to focus solely on fingerprints, even taking his own, and eventually found an opportunity through his position as Nadia’s magistrate to advocate bringing fingerprints into British colonial administration, as he argued that fingerprinting would prevent fraudulent practices in dealings between the peasants and landholders.44 No one inthe colonial government seriously heeded Herschel’s suggestion, but he kept working at finding a way to incorporate fingerprinting into colonial administration when he took a new position as magistrate and collector of the Hooghly district of Bengal at the beginning of 1877.45 Distrust of colonial subjects once again informed his experimental ambitions. While engaging with Indian pensioners, Herschel implemented a system whereby pensioners were forced to provide fingerprints while receiving a pension to hopefully prevent impersonators from falsely collecting pensions in the names of those deceased. He also incorporated fingerprinting into the registration department to authenticate deeds and bonds, and attempted, with little success, to bring fingerprinting to the Hooghly jails.46 However, when Herschel left South Asia at the end of 1877, the fingerprinting practices he had attempted to incorporate were also gradually abandoned. Nevertheless, the numerous samples gathered during these years of experimentation proved to be pivotal to the history of fingerprinting and the eventual discovery that fingerprints do not change over time.
Meanwhile Faulds, who came as a medical missionary to Japan in the 1870s, was working at the Tsukiji Hospital in Tokyo and observed fingermarks on ancient Japanese pottery while on an archaeological dig with a friend. He became interested in the study of fingerprints as marks of individuality and experimented with taking fingerprints himself. In 1880, he published a letter titled “On the Skin-Furrows of the Hand” in the journal Nature that explained his theories about fingerprints. He suggested that fingerprinting might be used in forensic science claiming that he had heard that “Chinese criminals from early times have been made to give the impressions of their fingers, just as we make ours yield their photographs.”47 With this letter Faulds positioned himself as the discoverer of fingerprinting, but Herschel would publicly counter Faulds and argue that his work in colonial India marked the moment of discovery.48 Herschel and Faulds would spend the remainder of their lives engaged in a debate over this subject. Faulds tried to solicit the help of Charles Darwin, who did not want to take up the study of fingerprinting, but Darwin passed along the information to his cousin Francis Galton. Ironically, Galton turned to Herschel as the primary early investigator of fingerprinting. Herschel sent Galton fingerprint specimens in 1888, and those specimens formed the backbone of Galton’s groundbreaking research on fingerprinting as an identity science. What was innovative about Faulds’s work on fingerprinting was that he was the first to suggest that the practice could be applied to the forensic realm and thus the modern practice of fingerprinting is greatly indebted to him.49
Colonial ambition and a missionary objective brought Herschel and Faulds to India and Japan, respectively. In Asia they made their discoveries; both India and Japan were spaces where colonial researchers and photographers were already trying to identify and classify people with other visual technologies such as photography.50 British colonial India in 1858 had just come under the governance of the British Crown with the establishment of the Raj, and Japan, though not a Western colony, had been newly opened up to missionaries and other imperially-driven explorers following the signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854. Herschel and Faulds’s experiences within these colonial/foreign landscapes appear to have prompted their turn toward fingerprinting. Herschel’s distrust was a product of the same colonial anxiety that led to projects like The People of India and other photographic studies of South Asian people. Faulds’s position as a missionary in a hospital provided him with a space to research and examine fingerprints taken from Japanese people he encountered while working as a doctor.51 Colonial explorations and experimentations in Asia in the second half of the 19th century, therefore, engendered a nexus of ideas concerning the future direction of identity sciences. This research had profound effects on what types of images would come to constitute productive forms of visual knowledge about the human body.
Galton, Eugenics, and Fingerprinting
In 1883, the same year that the Paris police formally incorporated Bertillonage into their operations, Sir Francis Galton coined the term eugenics.52 In addition to developing the term, Galton established many primary topics for the field by researching and writing about inheritance, race, and intelligence.53 In 1904, he defined the objectives of eugenics as “the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally.”54 The broader 19th-century interest in biology, emblematized by Darwin’s seminal The Origin of Species (1859),55 influenced Galton’s lifelong investment in human heredity; he remained convinced throughout his life that by studying the biological qualities of the human population those qualities could be improved for future generations.56 In the early 21st century, the field of eugenics has largely been rendered pseudoscience, as the notion that societies should support planned human breeding for ideal qualities has far too often been entangled with scientific racism and ideas about ethnic cleansing.57
Nevertheless, Galton’s attention to fingerprinting in the late 19th century derived from this interest in human heredity, and he committed himself to fingerprint research when presented with the subject because he believed fingerprints could offer additional information on hereditary markers. Prior to fingerprints, Galton focused on other forms of visual data in pursuit of his research objectives. Along with composite photographs, Galton experimented with contour lines based on facial profiles and analyzed anthropometric measurements dictated by Bertillonage as possible visual evidence of different hereditary traits.58 When Galton turned to fingerprinting, he was drawn to the ridge patterns he observed across fingerprint samples, and he believed that those patterns would communicate human attributes if the patterns could be understood.59 Galton also was interested in the idea, first teased by Faulds, that fingerprinting could be used to identify criminals, a notion that was doubly important for him in his work on human heredity and racial improvement.60 In his 1892 monograph, Finger Prints, Galton declared that prints would
be of continual good service in our tropical settlement, where the individual members of the swarms of dark and yellow-skinned races are mostly unable to sign their names and are otherwise hardly distinguishable by Europeans. And, whether they can write or not are grossly addicted to impersonation and other varieties of fraudulent practice.61

Figure 6. “Hooghly Fingerprint Copy,” The Galton Papers: Galton Box 127 (1893).
Galton’s most profound contribution to the study of fingerprints, however, did not ultimately correspond with his hopes that the practice could be put to use within the eugenics movement as a tool of racial improvement, although he continued to search for racial patterns until he passed away.62 Rather, Galton, who began studying Herschel’s samples in 1888, asserted that fingerprints were unique artifacts of the body and their ridge patterns permanent. Consequently, fingerprints could be read as accurate visual markers of identity.63 In Galton’s Anthropometric Laboratory, he photographically enlarged sample prints and exhaustively studied the ridge patterns. Herschel’s evidence, particularly his own fingerprints taken at different points in his life, proved to Galton that the ridge patterns were essentially staying the same over time.64 Galton even had Herschel work with civil servants back in British colonial India to re-collect fingerprints from pensioners whom Herschel originally fingerprinted as further confirmation of a fingerprint’s permanence (figure 6). Galton’s Finger Prints was a groundbreaking work in which, in addition to explicating the aforementioned conclusions, he also broke fingerprints down into pattern types to encourage their classification as visual records. The patterns were labeled “arch,” “loop,” and “whorl,” and this simple distinction formed the basis for future classificatory fingerprint systems wherein an individual’s fingerprint patterns could be broken down and labeled according to its pattern designation.65 Once the pattern designation was established, it would then be recorded on a form and filed alphabetically within an archive. In investigating Herschel’s fingerprint specimens as objects of study for possible eugenics purposes, Galton’s research ultimately established a pathway for fingerprinting to emerge as a prominent identity science in the late 19th century, and a classification system for fingerprinting would then be developed in South Asia and mobilized by law enforcement institutions around the world.
The Fingerprint Classification System
The fingerprint classification system, championed by Sir Edward Henry, inspector general of police in Bengal, in his 1900 manual The Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, represents the culmination of the colonial investment in using visual technologies to establish identity in British colonial India. Among police and prison officials, photography and anthropometry had failed to present an adequate response to the problem of identity, specifically the problem of confirming criminal identity to prevent fraud and impersonation. This problem was presented as even more urgent in colonial space since the racist views of many colonial officials implied that all South Asians looked alike, which suggested that the need to accurately identify was more pressing in South Asia.66 Photography was found limiting as a medium in the archiving of criminal bodies as photography could not be classified into categories so that the images could be easily searched and retrieved. And while a photograph is indexical, bodies age and a photograph only records a singular moment in time, which meant that a photograph had a limited window for use in confirming identity.67 Furthermore, photography in this context also demonstrated a reliance on text, as evinced by the 19th-century photographic studies of the people of South Asia, since it was the text that explicated the photograph’s function as symbolic of a type. While the production of textual data or measurements was not a problem in anthropometric systems, the accuracy of such data, as discussed earlier, particularly when it was reliant on human actors in its collection, proved problematic; errors were made, and images, such as the Andamanese hand and foot tracings, were vague artifacts offering little in the way of productive information.68 The anthropometric archive, which Bertillon had labored to introduce, was also rather large, making it cumbersome and inefficient for law enforcement’s daily use. Establishing a record within an anthropometric archive, for example, took over an hour.69
Fingerprinting, validated as a permanent marker of individual identity through Galton’s research, emerged by comparison as a much more ideal visual technology to harness in the identification of criminals within colonial space. Fingerprinting, like photography, was also indexical, but prints did not change much over time, and the taking of fingerprints was easier, faster, and less prone to human error than the collection of anthropometric data. Police clerks without scientific training could quickly become skilled at taking fingerprints. As fingerprints slipped onto the anthropometric records of the colonial Indian Police, the development of a classificatory system solely for fingerprinting would cement the practice’s importance as an identity science and eradicate the use of anthropometry within the domain of Indian law enforcement.

Figure 7. “Plate I—Sample Fingerprint Card.”
Henry, who began his work in India as a civil servant in 1873, had risen within the colonial administrative ranks to hold the prominent position of inspector general of the police in Bengal in 1891. This powerful position gave him license to experiment with different visual technologies. First, he first experimented with anthropometry but ended up not being its strongest advocate.71 After learning about fingerprinting from Galton’s monograph, Henry became interested in fingerprinting, incorporating it into Bengal’s anthropometric program.72 Next Henry and his assistants Chandra Bose and Azizul Haque—who had found Galton’s system, which had a complicated sub-classificatory aspect to the categorization of “arches,” “loops,” and “whorls,” ill suited for use among uneducated police clerks—worked to develop a more straightforward system of fingerprint classification that adopted the basic aspects of Galton’s system.73 In 1895, Henry presented his collaboration with Bose and Haque as his own work, although archival evidence suggests that Bose and Haque were significant agents in the work’s creation.74 The fingerprint classification system stipulated that suspected persons would be fingerprinted while in custody at the police station. A standard tabular fingerprint card would record “rolled” or “cylindrical projection” impressions of each of the four fingers as well as the thumb for both hands, along with “plain” or non-rolled impressions of each of the four fingers (figure 7).75 All that was required to produce this card was ink and a police clerk to take the impressions.
The card would then be sent to a policeperson trained in identifying the fingerprint pattern designation according to the new ten-digit classification system that allowed for 1,024 possible groupings.76 Within this system each digit was assigned a number either even or odd; for example, the right thumb was number “1” and then right index “2.” Next, this system took Galton’s observation of three basic ridge patterns as its foundation and incorporated “ridge counting” (the counting of papillary ridges) and “ridge tracing” (the measuring of distance between whorl patterns) as a methodology for clustering fingerprint samples. The fingerprint pattern on each digit would be assigned a numerical value that derived from the number of ridges on the digit.77 The policeperson would then add up the values of the even digits’ ridges plus one and make this value the numerator and then add up the values of the odd digits’ ridges plus one and make this value the denominator, creating a formula for each card. A slip with the formula from the card was then created and filed in an efficient open-faced cabinet that could contain up to twenty thousand records (figure 8).78

Figure 8. “Frontispiece—Photograph of filing cabinets.”
The system was formally adopted in Bengal in 1897, and then spread throughout British colonial India. The Indian police were quickly presented with opportunities to use fingerprints and the new classificatory system. The system was primarily used for the identification of recidivists, or habitual offenders colonists believed were predisposed to crime due to supposed hereditary impulses, and in rare cases, the police began to employ the system in the apprehension of criminals when fingerprint evidence was left behind.80 With the publication of The Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, the system Henry, Bose, and Haque devised was adopted in Britain and then spread to other global law enforcement systems. This colonial Indian system provided the foundation for early 21st-century automated fingerprint identification systems. The future of identity sciences was irrevocably altered as a result of the cultivation of fingerprinting within colonial space.
Discussion of the Literature
When Sir William Herschel published his early 20th-century monograph on his experiments with fingerprinting, his writing had already adopted a historicizing tone (see “Primary Sources”). Although in its infancy, this nascent field of dactylography, which had supplanted anthropometry in the 1920s, was celebrated in contemporary scientific/medical journals and texts as a radically important innovation in the modern project of citizen/subject identification. In the decades that followed, and as colonial institutions designed to support the use of fingerprinting during police investigations were established, further efforts to historicize the origins of fingerprinting were written. By the mid-20th century, a chronological history of fingerprinting and the key actors involved in its ascendance was clearly mapped and accessible within the aforementioned academic spheres.81 However, this history is an imperialist history that adopts an uncompromising position with respect to positioning fingerprinting (and the historical figures involved in its discovery/advancement) as a modernizing force. A critical approach to the history of fingerprinting, as well as anthropometry, emerged in the 1980s following Michel Foucault’s interrogation of modern forms of surveillance.
Foucault’s 1975 work Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison, which was translated into English as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison in 1977, inaugurated a broad range of scholarly investigations into modern systems of punishment as well as the socio-cultural conditions and shifting political landscapes that conditioned their development.82 By foregrounding surveillance as a central aspect of how citizen/subjects are disciplined by modern states, scholars built from Foucault’s intervention to critically consider surveillance as an apparatus that exists in a diversity of forms, including systems of identification. Histories of anthropometry and fingerprinting written beginning in the 1980s move away from an imperialist framing and were instead informed by the Foucauldian theoretical turn.
Anthropometry and fingerprinting are identification systems with a visual dimension that is often supported by or engaged with photography. Consequently, scholars and critics invested in histories of photography, such as John Tagg and Allan Sekula, produced some of the earliest impactful scholarship that scrutinized disciplinary institutions and the role that photography and other 19th-century identification systems played in visualizing the criminal body in Europe.83 Among numerous other groundbreaking observations on the history of photography, Tagg’s work revealed photography’s complicity as a social practice in supporting the exercise of state power through institutions such as the police, and demonstrates how the adoption of Sir Edward Richard Henry’s fingerprint system at New Scotland Yard in 1901 propagated the need for police photographers to photograph crime scenes.84 Sekula’s important work examined photography alongside other forms of bodily inquiry such as physiognomy and phrenology, noting how the study and production of images of the body engenders an archival paradigm wherein the archive as surveillance apparatus determines social identity and exerts control. Sekula also dwelled at length on the competing but related approaches of Alphonse Bertillon and Francis Galton and their aspirations to circumscribe the criminal body and determine ideal genetic traits, respectively.
British colonial India’s importance as a laboratory for experimenting with fingerprinting is mentioned briefly in citation within Sekula’s work. He draws attention to Carlo Ginzberg’s influential 1980 essay “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” in which Ginzberg critically shifts away from Europe to Asia.85 Ginzberg’s microhistory of frameworks of knowledge explicates the colonial origins of fingerprinting as a racially-informed system of identification. Further investigations into colonial systems of identification follow, supported by the epistemological and ethical objectives defining the field of postcolonial studies—the origins of which can be loosely be dated to the 1978 publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism.86
In the 1992, Elizabeth Edwards edited a volume of essays titled Anthropology and Photography: 1860–1920, which adopts a postcolonial approach to considering the way photography was harnessed in the service of pseudoscientific colonial projects to visually order the representation of peoples outside of Europe and the United States.87 Several essays in the volume specifically explore anthropometry’s entanglement with photography in colonial contexts, including Christopher Pinney’s first essay in the volume in which he reflects on Maurice Vidal Portman and Surgeon Captain William Molesworth’s anthropological study of the Andaman Islanders. In this particular case study, the excess of identification material—photographs and other anthropometric records—came to symbolize knowledge and power.88 In 1997, Pinney went on to publish a critically important monograph on photography in India. In this work he explores at length how photography in British colonial India was uniquely deployed as an apparatus of identification to make visible native peoples on anthropological grounds to ensure the future success of British rule.89 Anthropometry and fingerprinting are positioned within this same “detective” paradigm Pinney details, as both as were seen as having the potential to produce evidence about native peoples.
The history of fingerprinting received in-depth and interdisciplinary scholarly analysis in the 2000s. Criminologist Simon Cole’s monograph Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification details the ascendance of fingerprinting in the late 19th and 20th centuries in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the United States, and holistically considers the interrelationship between various systems of identification in the modern era to explicate how fingerprinting earned its position of authority within global society.90 Meanwhile, historian Chandak Sengoopta provided an excellent focused examination of fingerprinting in colonial India in his 2003 monograph Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting Was Born in Colonial India that not only foregrounds the importance of the colonial landscape for fomenting the practice, but also brings to light the important contributions of Henry’s Indian assistants Chandra Bose and Azizul Haque in the development of Henry’s fingerprinting system.91 In 2016, Mira Rai Waits, building from these expansive historical investigations of fingerprinting, analyzed fingerprints as images situated within a broader colonial visual culture that includes photography and anthropometry to further enrich the history of fingerprinting through a semiotic assessment of prints and their classificatory systems.92
Primary Sources
Primary materials, published and unpublished, on the introduction and implementation of anthropometric and fingerprinting colonial programs in British India are available in the United Kingdom and India. In London, the British Library’s India Office Records (IOR) repository contains numerous official and private records, including the Portman Collection (Photo 188/12 and Photo 188/13), which is comprised of ethnographical data and anthropometrical measurements collected by Maurice Vidal Portman and Surgeon Captain William Molesworth during their 1894 study of the Andaman Islanders. Other relevant IOR sources are the private papers of police official Sir Edward Richard Henry (Mss Eur F161/185) related to the introduction of fingerprinting within the colonial Indian police system, as well as various government correspondence on fingerprinting and anthropometry that is part of the repository of Public & Judicial Department records, specifically related to the colonial police and prison system’s adoption of anthropometric and fingerprinting programs. Additional government correspondence related to anthropometry and fingerprinting in British colonial India can be found in the National Archives of India in New Delhi, India as well as in Indian state and local archives.
Several published primary sources on anthropometry and fingerprinting are available through various digital databases. These published sources include the collected works of Sir Francis Galton, such as his monograph Finger Prints, along with his private papers, which were digitized by the Wellcome Collection and University College London.93 The Wellcome Collection also retains a copy of Alphonse Bertillon’s Identification Anthropométrique: Instructions Signalétiques, wherein he explicates his anthropometric system.94 Many of Henry Faulds’s publications, including his articles in Nature, are available.95 Henry’s monograph The Classification and Uses of Fingerprints and Sir William Herschel’s The Origin of Fingerprinting can be accessed through archive.org.96 Journal articles, such as prison official’s Frederic John Mouat’s “Notes on M. Bertillion’s Discourse on the Anthropometric Measurement of Criminals” and ethnologist John Beddoe’s “Anthropometry in India,” provide useful insights into the colonial enthusiasm for the implementation of pseudoscientific anthropometric programs in India; such records are available through databases like jstor.org.97
For images access, photographs produced as part of colonial anthropometric projects have been digitized. Photographs of the Andamanese are in the collection of the British Museum and can be accessed through the museum’s online library. Additionally, numerous colonial ethnographic photographs from South Asia are available for further visual culture study. The New York Public Library, for example, provides online access to images from The People of India.
Links to Digital Materials
Further Reading
- Cole, Simon A. Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
- Edwards, Elizabeth, ed. Anthropology & Photography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
- Ginzburg, Carlo. “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method.” History Workshop Journal no. 9 (1980): 5–36.
- Maxwell, Anne. Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1879–1940. East Sussex, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2008.
- Pinney, Christopher. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
- Pinney, Christopher. Photography and Anthropology. London: Reaktion Books, 2011.
- Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.
- Sen, Satadru. “Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures: M. V. Portman and the Andamanese.” American Ethnologist 36, no. 2 (2009): 364–379.
- Sengoopta, Chandak. Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting Was Born in Colonial India. London: Macmillan, 2003.
- Singha, Radhika. “Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in Colonial India.” Studies in History. 16, no. 2 (2000): 151–198.
- Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. London: Macmillan, 1988.
- Waits, Mira Rai. “The Indexical Trace: A Visual Interpretation of the History of Fingerprinting in Colonial India.” Visual Culture in Britain 17, no. 1 (March 2016): 1–29.
- Waits, Mira Rai. “Photographic Enlargements and Ethical Looking: Fingerprints from Hooghly.” Victorian Review 48, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 36–40.
Notes
1. Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 14.
2. Elizabeth Edwards, “Introduction,” in Anthropology & Photography, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 5–6.
3. Edwards, “Introduction,” 6; and Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
4. Flint, Victorians and the Visual Imagination, 3.
5. J. P. Ward, Mary Warner Marien, Gerald W. R. Ward, and J. P. Ward. “Photography,” Grove Art Online (Oxford University Press, January 10, 2019).
6. Marien, “Photography,” 33.
7. Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 17.
8. Pinney Christopher, Photography and Anthropology (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 21.
9. Mira Rai Waits, “The Indexical Trace: A Visual Interpretation of the History of Fingerprinting in Colonial India,” Visual Culture in Britain 17, no. 1 (March 2016): 10.
10. Pinney, Camera Indica, 28.
11. Pinney, Camera Indica, 28.
12. Sir John William Kaye, Meadows Taylor, and Great Britain, “India Office.” The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations, with Descriptive Letterpress, of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan, ed. J. Forbes Watson (London: India museum, 1868–1875), i–ii.
13. Prathama Banerjee, “Historic Acts? Santal Rebellion and the Temporality of Practice,” Studies in History 15, no. 2 (1999): 209–246.
14. Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1.
15. Norman Chevers, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for India: Including the Outline of a History of Crime against the Person in India (Kolkata: Thacker, Spink, 1870), 74.
16. Jonathan Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), XVII.
17. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883).
18. Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image, 21–22.
19. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.
20. Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image, 23.
21. Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image, 23–25.
22. Sekula, “Body and the Archive,” 27.
23. Sekula, “Body and the Archive,” 30–33.
24. Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image, 28.
25. Frank Spencer, “Some Notes on the Attempt to Apply Photography to Anthropometry during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Edwards, Anthropology & Photography, 99.
26. Spencer, “Some Notes on the Attempt,” 100.
27. Spencer, “Some Notes on the Attempt,” 100.
28. Elizabeth Edwards, “Science Visualized: E.H. Man in the Andaman Islands,” in Edwards, Anthropology & Photography, 108.
29. Edwards, “Science Visualized,” 109.
30. Satadru Sen, “Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures: M. V. Portman and the Andamanese,” American Ethnologist 36, no. 2 (2009): 365.
31. Sen, “Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures,” 365, 368.
32. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 10.
33. IOR/V/27/150/8, Criminal Identification by Means of Anthropometry, 2nd ed. (Kolkata: Government of India, 1895).
34. IOR/V/27/150/8, Criminal Identification, 1.
35. Cole, Suspect Identities, 64.
36. Cole, Suspect Identities, 64.
37. Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting Was Born in Colonial India (London: Macmillan, 2003), 60.
38. Herschel, Origin of Fingerprinting, 8–9.
39. Waits, “Indexical Trace,” 1.
40. Waits, “Indexical Trace,” 1.
41. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 2; and Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 6.
42. William Herschel, The Origin of Fingerprinting (London: Oxford University Press, 1916), 8.
43. Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj, 61, 87.
44. Waits, “Indexical Trace,” 28.
45. Waits, “Indexical Trace,” 8.
46. Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj, 73–77.
47. Henry Faulds, “On the Skin-Furrows of the Hand,” Nature 22 (1880): 605.
48. Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj, 85.
49. Cole, Suspect Identities, 74–75.
50. Anne Lacoste, Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010).
51. Faulds, “On the Skin-Furrows,” 605.
52. Philippa Levine, Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
53. Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj, 93.
54. Galton cited in Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities PressInternational, 1995), 3–9.
55. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859).
56. Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford, Introduction: Eugenics and the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3.
57. Levine and Bashford, Introduction, 4–5.
58. Mira Rai Waits, “Photographic Enlargements and Ethical Looking: Fingerprints from Hooghly,” Victorian Review 48, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 37.
59. Cole, Suspect Identities, 99–100.
60. Cole, Suspect Identities, 99.
61. Francis Galton, Finger Prints (London: Macmillan, 1892), 303.
62. Cole, Suspect Identities, 106.
63. Waits, “Indexical Trace,” 2.
64. Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj, 102.
65. Cole, Suspect Identities, 77.
66. Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 212.
67. Waits, “Indexical Trace,” 18–19.
68. Waits, “Indexical Trace,” 16–17.
69. Colin Beavan, Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime Detection and Murder Case that Launched Forensic Science (New York: Hyperion, 2001), 141.
70. Henry, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, Appendix, Plate 1.
71. Cole, Suspect Identities, 81.
72. Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj, 134.
73. Beavan, Fingerprints, 138–139.
74. Cole, Suspect Identities, 81.
75. Edward Richard Henry, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints(London: George Routledge and Sons, 1900), 14–15.
76. Cole, Suspect Identities, 81.
77. Cole, Suspect Identities, 81.
78. Waits, “Indexical Trace,” 21.
79. Edward Richard Henry, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, 4th edn (London: Darling and Son, 1913), frontispiece.
80. Cole, Suspect Identities, 88.
81. IOR Mss Eur F161/185: c. 1891–1965 Papers, compiled in the 1960s, relating to the history of fingerprinting, including Henry, Classification and Uses of Finger Prints, 3–5.
82. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Allan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).
83. See John Tagg, “A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in Law,” in The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: Macmillan, 1988), 66–102; and Sekula, “Body and the Archive,” 3–64.
84. Tagg, “Means of Surveillance,” 75–76.
85. Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop Journal no. 9 (1980): 5–36.
86. Edwards, Anthropology & Photography.
87. Edwards, Anthropology & Photography.
88. Christopher Pinney, “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography,” in Edwards, Anthropology & Photography, 74–96.
89. Pinney, Camera Indica.
90. Cole, Suspect Identities.
91. Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj.
92. Waits, “Indexical Trace,” 1–29.
93. Francis Galton, Fingerprints (London: Macmillan, 1892).
94. Alphonse Bertillon, Identification Anthropométrique: Instructions Signalétiques (Geneva, Switzerland: Melun Administrative, 1893).
95. Faulds, “On the Skin-Furrows,” 605; and “On the Identification of Habitual Criminals by Finger-Prints,” Nature 50 (1894, October 4): 548.
96. Henry, Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, 14-15; and Herschel, Origin of Fingerprinting.
97. Frederic John Mouat, “Notes on M. Bertillion’s Discourse on the Anthropometric Measurement of Criminals,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 20 (1891), 182–198; and John Beddoe, “Anthropometry in India,” Science Progress 4, no. 21 (1895): 188–203.