Aidan Forth
"The Concentration Camp: Violence and Humanitarianism in the British Empire, 1830-1980"
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Abstract
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Usually associated with twentieth-century totalitarian statecraft, the first concentration camps were constructed by Britain during the Boer War. My dissertation is the first project to chart the origins and development of the concentration camp in British imperial practice. I explore the affinities between prisons and poorhouses in Britain, famine and plague camps in South Asia, the concentration of aboriginal peoples in protective reservations in Australia, and especially the detention and quarantining of ships throughout Britain’s maritime empire. British camps were manifestations of ongoing efforts to manage imperial spaces and subjects and to reform nineteenth-century disciplinary institutions. The Boer War marked a terrestrial application of maritime detention as British military personnel imagined Boer commando units to be rogue ships and the African Veldt to be an unruly sea. Counterinsurgency strategies developed in the Boer War were then used as a template for the forcible encampment of civilians in WWI and WWII and during anti-colonial conflicts in British Palestine, Kenya, and Malaya. While concentration camps signal the darker side of British imperialism, their rehabilitative and “protective” dimensions suggest that humanitarian sentiment often accompanied dehumanizing violence. Without attending to British contributions to the development of the concentration camp, scholars risk missing dimensions of forcible detention often overlooked in more traditional histories of Auschwitz or the gulag. Specifically, the camp, as a British invention, has an imperial, maritime and, ironically, humanitarian pedigree.
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