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Jessi A J Gilchrist, Camps: a global history of mass confinement, International Affairs, Volume 101, Issue 3, May 2025, Pages 1136–1138, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaf080
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In public memory, concentration camps are associated almost exclusively with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. However, the various migrant detention centres, refugee camps and political prisons dotted across the globe remind us that human encampment is a practice that continues to this day. Aidan Forth's new book traces this evolution before and after the Nazi experience to show that authorities across time and space, as well as with different ideologies, have embraced camps as a method of social control. Forth demonstrates that human encampment has not been the export of any one primary creator, but it has ‘developed in a global arena’ through a series of encounters both between Europe and empire and across East and West (p. 4).
The author traces the development of different types of camps over time, beginning with the prisons, workhouses and labour colonies of the nineteenth century. These carceral spaces departed from the existing traditions of confinement in penal colonies, slave ships and segregated compounds that underpinned earlier European imperialism. They promised to deliver discipline and rehabilitation for the groups deemed undesirable in European societies where the politics of national, social and cultural belonging came to dominate. In this sense, these carceral spaces were founded on an agenda of reform and human improvement for criminals, vagrants and disabled persons. Imperialists overseas embraced a similar rhetoric. However, in practice, these captive spaces were worlds apart. In some cases, conditions were deliberately dire, reflecting the logic of ethnic cleansing upon which the imperial overseas camps were built. Disguised with charitable and paternalistic rhetoric, the reservation and residential school systems across north America served as tools of displacement, segregation and forced labour. In other instances, lethal conditions were the result of mismanagement and poor hygiene, rather than the consequence of any particular policy.
