This introductory chapter provides an overview of the key arguments and subjects discussed in the book, but it undertakes this review by means of a close investigation of the place of registration in contemporary scholarship. It explores the meaning of the term registration, and then examines the concept in existing social science theory, tracking the limits of its usage in the writings of Michel Foucault, Jack Goody, James Scott, and Amartya Sen's scholarship of social rights. It draws linkages between the chapters in the volume and the existing historiography on documentary government, drawing out the implications, in particular, of Clanchy's work. Moving beyond this review, it offers a theoretical account of the work of registration which highlights the (often neglected) dialectical politics at work in the registration of membership in human collectivities across time and region.