The nineteenth century saw a shift towards a bureaucratic regime of migration control in various European countries, centring on the use of local registration to detect so-called ‘undesirables’. However, how the bureaucratic institutions worked together to sustain this regime remains unclear. This article presents new insights from the perspective of a centralised body. The Belgian Sûreté Publique (SP) monitored foreigners nationwide through a complex administrative system involving state and private actors. The article focuses on how guest registers functioned as part of this system to monitor travellers. What guidelines did the SP establish and how were these enforced? How did modes of implementation in different urban settings differ from those in the previously overlooked countryside? The research uncovers a general compliance with the guidelines in different urban settings, albeit with some local variation. By contrast, the non-compliance by rural authorities was counteracted by systematic visits to rural lodging houses by the gendarmerie who turned these spaces into hotspots for arresting vagrants. The vast dataflow generated through guest registers was to some extent performative, but it was also processed by the SP and occasionally used to trace people. Guest registers were just one of the various complementary layers of information that created an inter-linked administrative world to control foreigners in Belgium.
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