Barbed-Wired Imperialism: Britain's Empire of Camps, 1876-1903

(How many professors have invoked the connection in their courses on the British Empire as a way of shocking students into recognizing the coercive nature of liberal imperialism?) And, as Aidan Forth writes in Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain's Empire of Camps, 1876-1903-a fascinating study of the development of British famine, plague, and wartime internment camps in the late-nineteenth-century Empire-there is an important genealogical link between these British precedents and their later Nazi and Soviet variants, one founded in a shared desire to purify and reorder the social body. Building on Irish precursors, colonial officials designed Indian famine camps to provide temporary assistance while imposing strict restrictions to make relief as unattractive as possible. Yet the Black African camps received just a third of the funding of their Afrikaner counterparts, and while natives had to survive on mealie meal (a local maize), Afrikaners occasionally could supplement their diets with meat and vegetables. [...]when malnutrition, inadequate housing, and outbreaks of disease sent the annual mortality rate in the Afrikaner camps skyrocketing to forty percent, the suffering of these putatively white colonial subjects generated a metropolitan humanitarian outcry that was never matched when the victims' skin was black or brown.