The best example I know of this model right now is my friends at Just Coffee. They are promoting what they call “transparent trade,” in which they essentially have no trade secrets. They publish their supplier contracts, profit-and-loss statements, and more on their website, justcoffee.coop. I see this as a proactive reputation system, or a consumer certification system. And… it’s been very successful for them.

“Moreover for the [better] breakinge of these heades and sectes, which I tould you was one of the greatest strengthes of the Irishe, me thinkes, yt should do very well to renewe that ould statute that was made in reigne of Edward the Fourth in England, by which it was comaunded, that wheras all men that used to be called by the name of theire sectes, accordinge to theire severall nacons, and had no surnames at all, that from thenceforth each one should take unto himselfe a severall surname, eyther of his trade or facultye, or of some quallety of his body or mynde, or of the place where he dwelte, so as everye one should be distinguished from other, or from the most parte, wherby they shall not onely not depend upon the head of their secte, as nowe they doe, but also shall in shorte tyme learne quyte to forgett this Irish natyon. And herewithall would I also wish all the Oes and the Mackes wich the head of the sectes have taken to theire names, to be utterly forbiden and extinguyshed; for that the same beinge an ould manner (as some sayth) first made by O Brin, for the strengthninge of the Irish, the abrogatinge therof will asmuch infable them.”

It appears that Spenser considered surnames to be something rather more specific than I have taken the term to be.

‘Before this transformation, for example, surnames existed mainly for the convenience of people in local communities, so they could tell each other apart. Surnames were adopted on an ad hoc basis for clarification, when there was some danger of confusion, and rarely continued from one generation to the next. If there were multiple Johns in a village, they might be distinguished by trade (“John the Miller”), location (“John of the Hill”), patronymic (“John Richard’s Son”), etc. By contrast, everywhere there have been family surnames with cross-generational continuity, they have been imposed by centralized states as a way of cataloguing and tracking the population—making it legible to the state, in Scott’s terminology.’

No, not precisely. Rather, those things were done in a different sequence and tapped into things that people were already doing anyway, for other reasons, with a lot of cultural variation (so making the identifying project easier). For instance:-

– Systematic mapping of urban addresses came first, a seventeenth century invention in occupied towns like Cologne to help the occupation (hence the famous brand of Eau de Cologne, 4711, based on an eighteenth century identification). Later, that approach was extended to be nearly universal on the back of the acceptability of postal systems.

– In many areas, e.g. Celtic ones, family names were developed under the clan system to identify people and their groups to each other, and not merely important in narrow localities. In his View of the Present State of Ireland – largely about ways to control the Irish – Spenser even found this a problem and said he was sick of all those “Macs” and “Os”. Only some groups had naming systems that originated as you describe (and there were often orthogonal systems for middle names, too). Polish surnames seem elaborate, because nearly every Pole was demonstrating an aristocratic connection in a very uncentralised society (noble descent wasn’t simply passed down to the eldest son); short Polish surnames like Bem and Ral simply don’t look Polish to outsiders, though they do exist. To me, the US custom of married women hyphenating their own surnames looks wrong, because that should be confined to the children of those marriages in which each parent keeps his and her own name, to indicate the children’s ancestry; that US hyphenation is conveying false information.

– People often warped the new strictures back into the old form, e.g. when Denmark, Sweden etc. insisted on enduring surnames, the old typical pattern of alternating, say, Lars and Jens to get Lars Jensen and Jens Larsen every other generation was kept etymologically accurate by ceasing to alternate names, giving lots of Lars Larsens and Jens Jensens. This was unhelpful for the identifying purpose of the centralisers (I have heard of the US Army bureaucratically allocating conscripts after 1942, ending up with one unit where everyone in every rank was surnamed Smith; they had been chosen alphabetically).

– People could and did change their names to escape notice; my own surname is Scottish and developed in this way in earlier generations by anglicising “MacLaren”, which was a risky name to have after the ’45 (compare MacDonald/Donaldson). Then again, reportedly one US Vietnam veteran reversed the letters of his surname, the better to lie low after his taste of the system – only to be called up again under the new name.