Introduction: Histories of surveillance from antiquity to the digital era

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides the history of surveillance from antiquity to the present day and delves into different regimes and practices of surveillance in concrete historical settings. The book argues that historical case studies illuminate the limitations of surveillance discourses and policies and – moreover – that surveillance in its implemented form nearly always has been problematised and often even failed in relation to real people and their societal circumstances. The field of surveillance studies is inevitable when discussing the aim and scope of the history of surveillance. The panopticon emerged as a diagram in the genealogy of punishment systems, but if one want to understand the workings of contemporary information technology systems, one might need to focus on other branches in the genealogy of surveillance.