Must be a consumer. Or a laborer.
About control of peoples' movement in space/place. Since the beginning.
"Vagrancy" of 1830s-onward Britain, people criminalized for being outside without being an employee, a laborer.
Breaking laws resulted in being sentenced to coerced debtor/convict labor. Coinciding with the 1830-ish climax of the Industrial Revolution and the land enclosure acts, the "Workhouse Act" aka "Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834" forced poor people to work for a minimum number of hours every day. The major expansion of the "Vagrancy Act" of 1838 made "joblessness" a crime and enhanced its punishment. (Coincidentally, the law's date of royal assent was 27 July 1838, just 5 days before the British government was scheduled to allow fuller emancipation of its technical legal abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean on 1 August 1838.)
"Vagrancy" of 1860s-onward United States, people criminalized for being outside while Black.
Widespread emancipation after slavery abolition in 1865 rapidly followed by outlawing loitering and de facto outlawed existing as Black in public. Inability to afford fines results in being sentenced to forced labor by working on chain gangs or prisons farms, some built atop plantations, etc.
"Vagrancy" of 1870s-onward across empires, people criminalized for being outside while being "foreign" and also being poor generally.
Especially from 1880-ish to 1918-ish, this was an age of widespread mass movement of peoples due to rapid proliferation of mass poverty and famine induced by global colonial extraction and "market expansion", vast agricultural "revolutions" of monoculture/cash crop extraction resulting in ecological degradation. Coinciding with and facilitated by new railroads and telegraphs, leading to imperial implementation or expansion of identity documents, strict work contracts, passports, immigration surveillance, and border checkpoints.
In 1877, British administrators in India develop what would become the Henry Classification System of taking and keeping fingerprints for use in binding colonial Indians to legal documents and contracts. That same year during the 1877 Great Railroad Strike, and in response to white anxiety about Black residents coming to the city during Great Migration, Chicago's police and surveillance institutions exponentially expand and pioneer "intelligence card" registers for tracking labor union organizing and Black movement, as Chicago's experiments become adopted by US military and expanded nationwide and later to US forces monitoring dissent in colonial Philippines and Cuba. Japan modeled its 1880 Penal Code anti-vagrancy statutes on French models, and introduces "koseki" register to track poor/vagrant domestic citizens as Tokyo's Governor Matsuda segregates classes, and the nation introduces "modern police forces". In 1882, the United States passes the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1884, the Ottoman government enacts major "Passport Nizamnamesi" legislation requiring passports. In 1885, during the "Tacoma riot" or "expulsion", a mob of hundreds of white residents rounded up all of the city's Chinese residents, marched them to the train station, kicked them out of the city, and burned down the Chinese neighborhood, introducing what is called "the Tacoma method".
Punished for being Chinese in San Francisco. Punished for being Korean in Japan. Punished for crossing Ottoman borders without correct paperwork. A poor person in the Punjab, starving during the catastrophic famine, might be coerced into a work contract by British authorities. They will have to travel, shipped off to build a railroad in British Kenya. But now they have to work. Now they are bound. They will be punished for being Punjabi and trying to walk away from their work contract on Britain's tea plantations in Assam or Britain's rubber plantations in Malaya. And if they break the employment contract? Then Britain will imprison them and put them to work as a convict laborer instead.
"Vagrancy" amidst all of this, people also criminalized for being outside while "unsightly" and merely even superficially appearing to be poor. (San Francisco introduced the notorious "ugly law" in 1867, making it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view".) Today, if you walk into a building looking a little "weird" (poor, Black, ill, disabled, etc.) or carrying a small backpack, you are given seething spiteful glares and asked to leave.
"Vagrancy" everywhere in the United States, a combination of all of the above. De facto criminalized for simply going for a stroll without downloading the coffee shop's exclusive menu app.
"Vagrancy", since at least early nineteenth century Europe. About the control of movement through and access to space/place. Corralling people, extracting their wealth/labor.
You are permitted to exist only as a paying customer or an employee.
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