Overview

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. 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 Nazi camps). Such camps existed (and exist) under a variety of regimes, often concomitant with empire-building by revolutionary dictatorships, as sites of genocide, mass murder, and performative violence, but also as central elements of utopian schemes of social and racial transformation. Integrating the perspective of perpetrators and the victims and contextualizing them within the historiography of other carceral institutions, the book will reshape the way we think about concentration camps as part of modern civilization.

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Alan Kramer has published widely on the history of war, including the prize-winning German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (with coauthor John Horne). His next book, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War applied a transnational perspective to war in Europe, 1912-23. As one of the founding editors of 1914-1918 Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, he has been at the forefront of the turn to global history, which inspired also his coedited books, Welt der Lager: Zur ""Erfolgsgeschichte"" einer Institution, and Fascist Warfare, 1922-1945. British audiobook narrator and AudioFile Earphones Award winner Nigel Patterson has many credits as a stage, screen, and voice-over actor that influence his powerful characterization across a broad range of genres. AudioFile commented ""his keen ear and impeccable diction give insights into the prevailing attitudes of the period . . . his wholly credible characters stay with you long after you unplug."" A graduate linguist of the University of Oxford, he is fluent in French and Spanish, has lived and worked in the U.S. for fifteen years, and knows many different accents and dialects from around the world.

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