Concentration Camps: A Global History

A global and comprehensive history of a modern institution of inhumanity. In popular perception concentration camps are synonymous with genocide and Nazi racial extermination.Yet concentration camps were and are a global phenomenon, not restricted to Nazi Germany, used at times even by democracies, with an astonishing range of functions. Drawing together a wide range of multi-lingual archival research and synthesising a broad secondary literature, Alan Kramer provides here a comprehensive history of concentration camps, charting their first establishment at the beginning of the twentieth century on the colonial periphery, through their most extreme and inhuman instances in the mid-twentieth century, to their continued use today.Concentration camps are shown to be a truly transnational phenomenon that emerged both simultaneously (within and between imperial spheres-Britain, Spain, the USA, and Germany around 1900), and diachronically (from then to the First World War, the Gulag, and Naz