Camps in a Time of War

Guerrilla warfare during the South African (or Anglo-Boer) War presented a new context for the development of British camps. On the one hand, camps were a measure of military counterinsurgency that concentrated and detained scattered civilian populations suspected of aiding enemy insurgents. On the other hand, camps were measures of social control and sympathetic concern that organized shelter and humanitarian relief for refugees who had been displaced by scorched earth warfare and were congregating in overcrowded towns. Boer and African refugees presented a specter of social destitution and sanitary disarray familiar from Indian plague and famine operations. Like plague and famine camps, wartime concentration camps removed “uncivilized” and unhygienic populations from the center of towns and systematized ad hoc charitable arrangements by confining relief within demarcated boundaries. Although Boers were ostensibly Europeans respected for their vigor and courage, racialized discourses in the later phases of an asymmetric conflict denigrated them as uncivilized and even subhuman: such representations ultimately facilitated encampment.

“A Source of Horror and Dread”

Plague infected India in 1896 and spread across the empire due to the transportation and communication networks fostered by imperial trade and military aggression. As microbes travelled to new imperial outposts, so did British medical experts like William Simpson, who imported Indian technologies of disease control to South Africa. Inspections conducted at train stations identified disease carriers and detained them in segregation camps. In Bombay and other cities, urban cleansing campaigns by military and police forces systematically rounded up “suspects” and evacuated them to suburban camps. The “war against plague” depended on coercion and an unprecedented set of interventions into the health and welfare of colonial populations. It reflected tangible medical concerns but also operated according to the cultural proclivities of late-Victorian empire: discourses of race and class along with anxieties about security facilitated encampment as much as scientific analysis or the precepts of germ theory.

Britain’s Empire of Camps

During colonial states of emergency officials collected distressed and potentially dangerous populations and concentrated them in purpose-built camps. Camps were rational responses to contingent disasters (hunger, disease and war) but they also emerged from more basic rationales oriented around the care and control of diseased, destitute and otherwise dangerous bodies. Existing scholarship treats camps as straightforward, epiphenomenal products of distinct crises and fails to make structural connections between related episodes of encampment or trace the trans-imperial pathways that connected different camp regimes in concrete ways. Britain’s repeated resort to mass extrajudicial confinement indicates that the rights prescribed by Victorian liberalism did not apply to subjects considered illiberal, uncivilized or incapable of self-government. Although camps drew from practices and principles honed in metropolitan Britain, they were a primarily imperial development.

Camps Go Global

Britain’s empire of camps set a template for military detention during World War I and World War II as well as for humanitarian management throughout the twentieth century. British concentration camps must be distinguished from Nazi concentration camps, which were exceptional instruments of terror and genocide. But apart from their propaganda value for rival regimes, British camps foreshadowed practices of racial hygiene and the pre-emptive extrajudicial mass detention of social outsiders in modern authoritarian polities. British camps also anticipated wartime civilian internment and the development of modern refugee camps, which echo the familiar dynamics of coercion and care that first framed the development of camps under the auspices of liberal empire.

“A System Steadily Perfected”

In an effort to reduce mortality rates from epidemic disease, the British government engaged in a campaign to reform the Anglo-Boer War concentration camps. Officials like Alfred Milner and Joseph Chamberlain actively mobilized imperial Britain’s long history of encampment and solicited expertise from the fields of metropolitan welfare and social investigation to appoint a women’s committee (led by Millicent Fawcett) to visit the camps and recommend reforms. Chamberlain also contacted the India Office and ultimately imported Colonels Samuel J. Thomson and James S. Wilkins, who had analogous inter-imperial experience managing plague and famine camps in India. Drawing from lessons synthesized in India, these “imperial careerists” introduced stricter discipline and new measures like barbed-wire quarantine wards and forced hospitalization, which ultimately reduced camp mortality. New camps in Cape Colony and Natal constructed by Wilkins and Thomson refined camp management to a state of perfection and helped vindicate concentration camps as a legitimate technology of imperial statecraft and emergency relief.

Concentrating the “Dangerous Classes”

Britain assembled the foundations of its empire of camps over the course of the nineteenth century. The institutions of mass industrial society—workhouses, prisons, and factories—affirmed concentration and confinement as normative methods to discipline the vagrant and criminal poor. The military institutionalized army camps and POW camps as disciplinary technologies and disseminated them across the empire. Criminal tribe settlements in India experimented with measures of spatial and social control later used in the context of wartime counterinsurgency. Their proponents imagined such settlements to be measures of social quarantine that would protect society from the dangerous classes while curing and reforming those detained. Medical and military metaphors provided a powerful language that would frame the development of future camps across Britain’s late-Victorian empire.

“Only Matched in Times of Famine and Plague”

This chapter examines inmate life inside the Anglo-Boer War concentration camps. Native African refugees were segregated into a system of labor camps while British officials developed a form of governmentality that sought to educate, anglicize and rehabilitate Boer refugees by inculcating British cultural ideals and industrial habits, thereby transforming them into imperial citizens and willing partners of a British South Africa. The medical techniques of quarantine and segregation were adapted to inmates suspected of political subversion, who were detained in undesirable camps. Ultimately, both African and Boer camps suffered from the spread of epidemic diseases like measles, which resulted in staggering mortality rates in the camps and created a damaging political scandal in Britain. The humanitarian reformer Emily Hobhouse noted that scenes of suffering and death in the concentration camps could only be matched by similar sights during plague and famine in India.

Concentrated Humanity

Plague and famine camps emerged from different contingencies, but they presented similar problems in disciplining large concentrations of unruly and unhygienic colonial subjects. This chapter examines the diverse layouts and blueprints that camps exhibited while tracing a process of standardization by which a favored camp anatomy gradually emerged and was codified in government reports and published blue books. There also developed a set of standard operating procedures for camp management as medical experts synthesized lessons in the control of epidemic diseases like cholera and smallpox. Ultimately, British officials exhibited a condescending attitude and coercive ethic towards camp inmates, whom they compelled by force to obey camp rules and regulations. By the turn of the nineteenth century, camps emerged as a recognized and ubiquitous instrument of colonial rule.

“Barbed-Wire Deterrents”

Famine in India during the 1870s and 1890s was the context for the development of British camps on a mass and unprecedented scale. In a “state of exception,” extrajudicial detention camps arrested emaciated wanderers, who aroused humanitarian sympathy but also presented a health hazard as potential disease carriers and a security threat as members of the “criminal classes”—as with criminal tribes, rootless and mobile native bodies provoked anxiety and fear. Camps under the purview of the Bombay Governor Sir Richard Temple and his successors brought geometric order to colonial chaos by containing itinerant populations and making them legible to colonial state bureaucracy. Meanwhile, dormitory camps attached to public works projects operated according to the precepts of laissez-faire capitalism and Victorian political economy. By applying a series of automatic “labor,” “distance” and “residence” tests, famine relief camps (like metropolitan workhouses) dissuaded all but the most deserving poor from seeking government relief.