Concentration Camps
by Dan Stone, OUP, £12.99
The sociologist and Polish freedom-fighter Zygmunt Bauman called the 20th century “the century of camps”. While history provides many examples of repression and incarceration, the particular nature of these institutions is unique to modernity.
In this terse, punchy book, Stone charts the history of concentration camps, then asks what these institutions tell us about our modern world. Concentration camps first grew out of the 19th-century colonial practice of herding native peoples into reservations in order to both control and alter demographics. They evolved into their present form during the bloody colonial wars at the turn of the century.
