Concentration Camps

Description

Dan Stone presents a global history of concentration camps, and considers the importance of these institutions to modern consciousness and identity. Tracing camps from their origins in in early-twentieth century colonial warfare, he discusses their evolution throughout the last century, and the complex questions their use raises.

• Offers a global history of concentration camps, showing the differences and similarities between the various camp systems which have been used in the twentieth century
• Shows how camps have emerged in different places in different times, and argues that whilst creators of camp systems did learn from one another to some extent, camps are a largely "organic" development of modern states.
• Sets the camps of the Third Reich into a global context, exploring the tradition they evolved from and also explaining what sets Nazi Germany apart from other regimes.
• Explores how camps have been central to modern states' responses to crisis

About the Author(s)

Dan Stone, Professor of Modern History, Royal Holloway, University of London

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is also Director of the Holocaust Research Centre. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, including Histories of the Holocaust (OUP, 2010) and The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Yale, 2015), and some seventy scholarly articles. He is currently the recipient of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, working on a project on the International Tracing Service.

Table of Contents

Preface
1:What is a Concentration Camp?
2:Origins
3:The Third Reich's World of Camps
4:The Gulag
5:The Wide World of Camps
6: "An Auschwitz Every Three Months ": Society as Camp?
References
Further Reading
Index

Reviews

"In this elegant and compact book, therefore, the prolific Holocaust historian Dan Stone poses a highly pertinent question: what is a concentration camp? The answer is anything but simple." - Christopher Dillon (Kings College, London), International Affairs 94:2

"Dan Stone has succeeded in providing an outstanding overview of the world of the concentration camp that, with fewer than two hundred pages, remains virtually unrivalled as a quick introduction to the topic." - Marc Buggeln (Humboldt University), European History Quarterly, Vol. 47

"[An] elegant and compact book... admirably measured and insightful." - Christopher Dillon, International Affairs

"Terse, punchy ... Stone has a simple style that conveys the horrors of the camps without lurching into sensationalism as he tries to situate camps within larger structures of state-building and incarceration. This is a grim history, but one we must not flinch from remembering." - Catholic Herald

"A tour-de-force... Stone succeeds in adapting a highly complex subject-matter for a broad public." - Kim Wünschmann, H-Soz-u-Kult (translated from German)