{"id":48844,"date":"2025-10-13T20:07:33","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T20:07:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/historiografija.hr\/?p=48844"},"modified":"2025-10-13T20:08:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T20:08:25","slug":"alan-kramer-concentration-camps-a-global-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/historiografija.hr\/?p=48844","title":{"rendered":"Alan Kramer, “Concentration Camps: A Global History”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A global and comprehensive history of a modern institution of inhumanity.<\/strong>

In popular perception concentration camps are synonymous with genocide and Nazi racial extermination. Yet concentration camps were and are a global phenomenon, not restricted to Nazi Germany, used at times even by democracies, with an astonishing range of functions.

Drawing together a wide range of multi-lingual archival research and synthesising a broad secondary literature, Alan Kramer provides here a comprehensive history of concentration camps, charting their first establishment at the beginning of the twentieth century on the colonial periphery, through their most extreme and inhuman instances in the mid-twentieth century, to their continued use today. Concentration camps are shown to be a truly transnational phenomenon that emerged both simultaneously (within and between imperial spheres\u2014Britain, Spain, the USA, and Germany around 1900), and diachronically (from then to the First World War, the Gulag, and Nazi camps). Such camps existed (and exist) under a variety of regimes, often concomitant with empire-building by revolutionary dictatorships, as sites of genocide, mass murder, and performative violence, but also as central elements of utopian schemes of social and racial transformation. Integrating the perspective of perpetrators and the victims and contextualising them within the historiography of other carceral institutions, the book will reshape the way we think about concentration camps as part of modern civilization, past and present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introduction
Part I. Origins? Colonial Liberation Wars at the Turn of the Twentieth Century<\/strong>
1:From Early Modern Europe to Colonial Warfare
Part II. The First World War: Laboratory or Archive?<\/strong>
2:The Authoritarian Empires in the First World War
3:The Liberal Empires in the First World War
4:The Inter-War Period
Part III. The Gulag<\/strong>
5:The Invention of the Gulag: From Repression to Empire-Building, 1918-1937
6:The Shifting Purposes of the Gulag from the Early 1930s to 1941
7:The Gulag from the Second World War to Its Post-War Demise
Part IV. The Nazi Camp Universe<\/strong>
8:Nazi Germany, 1933-1939
9:The Nazi Concentration Camp System and the Turning Point, 1939
10:The Prisoner of War Experience
11:Nazi Concentration Camps in the Second World War
12:Auschwitz and the Death Camps
13:Comprehending the Nazi Camps
Part V. Other Camps During and After the Second World War<\/strong>
14:Other Concentration Camps in the Second World War
15:Concentration Camps After the Second World War
Part VI. The Contemporary World<\/strong>
16:Amnesia and Memory
17:Concluding Remarks<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Reviews<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Alan Kramer has produced an impressive synthesis of the history of camps in the 20th century, replacing Jo\u00ebl Kotek’s and Pierre Rigolout’s massive account first published in 2000 and complementing the shorter recent camp histories written by Dan Stone and Aidan Forth.” – Jonas Kreienbaum, H-Soz-Kult<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

About the Author<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alan Kramer, Senior Professor, University of Hamburg<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alan Kramer has published widely on the history of war, including the prize-winning German Atrocities 1914. A History of Denial (Yale UP, 2001, with co-author John Horne). His next book, Dynamic of Destruction. Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (OUP, 2007) applied a transnational perspective to war in Europe, 1912-23. As one of the founding editors of 1914-1918 Online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, he has been at the forefront of the turn to global history, which inspired also his co-edited books, Welt der Lager. Zur “Erfolgsgeschichte” einer Institution (Hamburger Edition, 2013), and Fascist Warfare, 1922-1945 (Palgrave, 2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Publisher<\/strong>: Oxford University Press<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Published<\/strong>: 28 April 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pages<\/strong>: 640<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/global.oup.com\/academic\/product\/concentration-camps-9780198800620<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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