Iain R. Smith (Warwick) and Andreas Stucki (Berne) 1 'The colonial development of concentration camps (1868-1902)' The forced labour and extermination camps established in Europe during the Second World War gave the meaning to the term 'concentration camp' which it has for the general public today. But the practice of concentrating civilians in guarded camps or centres, specifically as part of a counter-guerrilla military strategy during wartime, long pre-dated and outlasted the Second World War. In the light of fresh research this article looks comparatively at the function of the camps in four different colonial arenas between 1868 and 1908. It emphasizes the different purposes between these exercises in civilian concentration and the 'camp culture' of the Nazi era in Europe and challenges the linkage between the two asserted by Hannah Arendt half a century ago and by many others since. It has long been argued that the origins of concentration camps lie in the colonial arenas of imperial powers at the turn of the 19 th and 20 th centuries. 2 It was in the context of the British camps in South Africa (1900-1902) that the term 'concentration camp' was first put into general currency in English-as Goering pointed out to the British ambassador to Berlin in 1938. 3 But the phenomenon has usually been traced back to the Spanish-Cuban War of 1895-1898. Reference to (re)concentrados, however, occurred earlier in Cuba, during the Ten Years' War (1868-1878) and the Guerra chiquita (1879-1880), though the term 'concentration camp' is rarely found in the Cuban case, where civilians were concentrated in towns and villages under surveillance by Spanish regulars and irregulars. The internment of civilians in guarded camps, under conditions which regularly resulted in high mortality, was also a feature of strife-torn Europe long before the Second World War. 4 Yet it is the forced labour and extermination camps in Europe, between 1939 and 1945, which gave the common meaning to the term 'concentration camp' which it has today. 5 Since in South Africa and Cuba the later Nazi associations of the term 'concentration camp' have been deliberately exploited, it is important to acknowledge distinctions when the same term is used
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