Get Free Shipping on orders over $79
Concentration Camps : A Global History - Alan Kramer
eTextbook alternate format product

Instant online reading.
Don't wait for delivery!

Go digital and save!

Concentration Camps

A Global History

By: Alan Kramer

Hardcover | 28 April 2025

At a Glance

Hardcover


$123.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $30.94 with

 or 

Ships in 10 to 15 business days

In popular perception concentration camps are synonymous with genocide. In fact, the great majority of concentration camps were not sites of genocide. This book shows they were a global phenomenon, with an astonishing range of functions. It asks why they were invented in the twentieth century, not before. Their origin on the colonial periphery raises questions about continuities from imperial warfare to political repression under authoritarian dictatorships and to the contemporary world. Concentration camps are a transnational phenomenon, emerging in learning processes 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). Discussing concentration camps not solely in the context of Auschwitz and genocide sometimes encounters strong emotional resistance; the notion that camps had functions other than mass murder seems like breaching a taboo. This sense of shock will spark curiosity for the argument that camps existed (and exist) under a variety of regimes, including at times democratic powers. They are often concomitant with empire-building by revolutionary dictatorships, used as sites of performative violence, and also as central elements of utopian schemes of social and racial transformation. The book contextualizes them with other carceral institutions, and integrates the perspective of perpetrators and the victims. It will reshape the way we think about concentration camps as part of modern civilization, past and present.

More in General & World History

Surveying the Wild Abyss : Unravelling settler memory - Barry Corr
A History of France in 21 Women : History in 21 Women - Katherine Pangonis
The Ridge Must Not Fall : The Secret War Beneath Messines, 1917 - Craig Deayton
The Anarchy : The Relentless Rise of the East India Company - William Dalrymple
The Children of Ash and Elm : A History of the Vikings - Neil Price
The Dawn of Everything : A New History of Humanity - David Graeber
The Happiest Man on Earth - Eddie Jaku

RRP $32.99

$26.99

18%
OFF
Rasputin : And the Downfall of the Romanovs - Antony Beevor

RRP $55.00

$40.75

26%
OFF
Talking Classics : The Shock of the Old - Mary Beard

RRP $36.99

$29.99

19%
OFF
A Fortunate Life : The Australian Classic - A B Facey

RRP $34.99

$28.75

18%
OFF
The Golden Road : How Ancient India Transformed the World - William Dalrymple
Say Nothing : True Story Of Murder and Memory In Northern Ireland - Patrick Radden Keefe