The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa and the Philippines, 1896–1907

Abstract

This article contends that new cultures of military professionalism were crucial to the emergence of the concentration camp as a social phenomenon in the late 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. It uses an analysis of the interaction between professional military culture and the process of war-fighting to provide a better understanding of the origins of the camp. Military professionalism, despite important national differences, took instrumental rationality as a core value. This produced a willingness by soldiers to take responsibility for organizing civilian populations on a macro-social scale. In each of four case studies, clearing the population from the rural areas in a ‘scorched earth’ response to guerilla activity led to the development of the camps. The article argues that this approach has more explanatory adequacy than those based on theories of genocide, biopower, exceptional states, racial ideology, or rational choice. The paper suggests that a major way in which the camps of 1896–1907 were linked to mid 20th century camps was through a global diffusion of the concept, via new forms of print media.

Keywords:

• Cuban Revolt against Spain
• South African War
• Boer War
• American-Filipino War
• Herero Revolt
• Hannah Arendt
• Giorgio Agamben
• Michel Foucault

Notes

⁴Eyffinger, Hague Peace Conference, 313.

¹A. Eyffinger, The 1899 Hague Peace Conference: The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1999), 17.

²G. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 57.

³Eyffinger, Hague Peace Conference, 316.

⁵ The Times, 15 June 1901.

⁶J. Wilson, C-B: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London: Constable 1973).

⁷G. Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnestota Press, 2000), 37.

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⁹Agamben, Means Without End, 37.

¹⁰H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966).

¹¹M. Mazower, ‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century’, The American Historical Review, 107, 4 (2002), 1158–1178; P. Holquist, ‘Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work: Bolshevik Surveilance in Its Pan-European Context’, The Journal of Modern History, 69, 3 (1997), 415–450; P. Holquist, ‘Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia in the Epoch of Violence, 1905–21’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, 3 (2003), 627–652; I.V. Hull, ‘Military Culture and the Production of “Final Solutions” in the Colonies: The Example of Wilhelminian Germany’, in R. Gellately and B. Kiernan, eds, The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 141–162; I.V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); P.A. Kramer, ‘Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine-American War as Race War’, Diplomatic History, 30, 1 (2006), 169–210.

¹²M. Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (New York: The Free Press, 1971), 5–6.

¹³D.A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). J. Black, Rethinking Military History (Milton Park: Routledge, 2004), 174–200, amongst others, disputes this periodisation; but Bell shows that there remains is a powerful case to be made for the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as constituting the first modern wars.

¹⁴S. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1985), 19–58, 222–269.

¹⁵G. Brennan, The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 57–63.

¹⁶Huntington, Soldier and the State, 19–58, 222–260.

¹⁷Huntington, Soldier and the State, 19–58.

¹⁸Brennan, Spanish Labyrinth, 59.

¹⁹W. Robertson, From Private to Field Marshall (London: Constable, 1921).

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²³H. Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), 4.

²²Hull, Absolute Destruction.

²⁴Hull, Absolute Destruction, 324.

²⁵Janowitz, Soldier and the State; Strachan, Politics; C. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan (New York: Telos, 2007).

²⁶J.L. Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba 1895–1898 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2006).

²⁷Tone, War and Genocide, 121.

²⁸Tone, War and Genocide.

²⁹F. Pretorius, ed., Scorched Earth (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 2001).

³⁰F. Pretorius, ‘Reflection’, in Pretorius, ed., Scorched Earth, 268.

³¹S.B. Spies, ‘The Hague Convention of 1899 and the Boer Republics’, in Pretorius, ed., Scorched Earth, 168–177.

³²B. Nasson, ‘Civilians in the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902’, in J. Laband, ed., Civilians in Wartime Africa: From Slavery Days to Rwandan Genocide (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007), 85–111.

³³There has recently been a wave of revisionist writing about the South African camps, dissecting the creation of a Boer mythology of cruelty and genocide about them, and arguing for the relatively non-coercive character of the camps and the rapidity and effectiveness of sanitary reform within them. Liz Stanley, in Mourning Becomes … Post/Memory and Commemoration of the Concentration Camps of the South African War 1899–1902 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), stresses the way in which narratives about the camps were subsequently constructed and used as a justificatory ideology by Afrikaner nationalism. Elizabeth van Heynigen, in ‘A Tool for Modernization? The Boer Concentration Camps of the South African War 1899–1902’, South African Journal of Science 106, 5/6 (2010), 52–61, stresses the need for a more nuanced view of the regional local differences amongst the camps, and suggests that the previous literature has generalised excessively from the terrible early months of the camps as a basis for describing the camps in general. She has also makes an interesting argument that Milner used the reformed camps as an instrument of modernisation of Boer society. Iain Smith reports in similar terms: I.R. Smith, ‘Morbidity and Mortality in the Concentration Camp of the South African War (1899–1902)’, http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/chm/research_teaching/archive/morbidity/ (accessed 11 March 2011). But the new studies do not fundamentally disrupt my argument. Firstly, it remains clearly the case that the camps was an initiative of the military, and arose from the process of war-fighting, driven by the concerns of ambitious professional officers. My argument does not rely on genocidal intentions on the part of the British, and indeed I don't think any serious historian would claim such intention. Secondly, although van Heynigen's sophisticated statistical data on the differences in mortality between camps is very valuable, there is no disputing that the early period of their existence was disastrous. And it was clearly foreseeable, in the state of medical knowledge at that time, that concentrating populations in this way would have these effects, so my point that military logic over-rode Martens-type considerations still stands. Thirdly, it is not news to any student of Afrikaner nationalism that later Afrikaner ideologues manipulated the imagery of the camps to their own purposes, although certainly it is good to have more detailed studies of how this happened. But I do not think that lessens the extent to which the war was an onslaught on civilians of a devastating kind. Of course no one should sensibly suggest that there was a moral equivalence between these institutions and the Nazi or Stalinist camps. But, as I argue here, the international 1896–1907 developments did mark an unprecedented level of the military organisation of civilian populations. The South African camps therefore represent a form of instrumental rationality which is not without affinities to later, more totalitarian events. Indeed, the South African camps’ sanitary and modernising elements may in a sense have made them all the more pernicious, by legitimising the camp idea internationally. It seems to me that the danger in the new literature is that in its anxiety to debunk Afrikaner nationalist ideology, it inadvertently takes on a curiously apologetic tone on behalf of the British military and administrative machines.

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³⁵Kramer, ‘Race Making’.

³⁶ Boot, Savage Wars, 120.

³⁷ Boot, Savage Wars, 120–122.

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³⁹Hull, ‘Military Culture’; Hull, military Destruction.

⁴⁰Hull, ‘Military Culture’; Hull, Absolute Destruction.

⁴¹Smith, Logic, 204

⁴²Hull, Absolute Destruction, 123.

⁴⁵ Hull, Absolute Destruction., 155.

⁴³S. Dabringhaus, ‘An Army on Vacation? The German War in China 1900–1901’, in Boemke, Chickering and Forster, Anticipating Total War, 459–476.

⁴⁴Hull, Absolute Destruction.

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⁴⁷Mazower, ‘Violence and the State’, 1162.

⁴⁸S. Power, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 58–59, 68–69.

⁴⁹Mazower, ‘Violence and the State’, 1163–1165.

⁵⁰Agamben, ‘Means without End’, 40.

⁵¹M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2009), 367.

⁵²Hull, Absolute Destruction, 129.

⁵³ Hull, Absolute Destruction, 129, 184, 193.

⁵⁴ Hull, Absolute Destruction, 184–186.

⁵⁵Smith, ‘Logic’.

⁵⁶G. Steinmetz, ‘Return to Empire: The New U.S. Imperialism in Comparative Perspective’, Sociological Theory, 23, 4 (2005), 341.

⁵⁷M. Lake and H. Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

⁵⁸Gong, Standard of Civilization, 184.

⁵⁹Kramer, ‘Race-Making’, 171.

⁶¹J.F.C. Fuller, The Last of the Gentlemen's Wars: A Subaltern's Journal of the War in Southern Africa 1899–1902 (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), 41.

⁶⁰P. Krebs, Gender, Race and the Writing of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 117; K. Nagai, Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2006), 95.

⁶²Hull, Absolute Destruction, 233.

⁶³Eyffinger, Hague Convention, 227.

⁶⁴Kramer, ‘Race-Making’.

⁶⁵A.B. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 13.

⁶⁶Downes, Targeting Civilians, 13.

⁶⁷H.S. Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890–1930 (Brighton: Harvester, 1979).

⁶⁸N. Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 3–34.

⁶⁹F. Yasamee, ‘Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz and the Boer War’, in K. Wilson, ed., The International Impact of the Boer War (Chesham: Palgrave, 2001), 204–205.

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⁷¹T.H.E. Travers, ‘Technology, Tactics and Morale: Jean de Bloch, the Boer War and British Military Theory, 1900–1914’, The Journal of Modern History, 51, 2 (1979), 267, 279–283.

⁷²Arendt, Origins, 186.

⁷³R.H. King and D. Stone, eds, Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide (New York: Berghahn, 2007).

⁷⁴In Origins, Arendt cites only two historians of South Africa of any substance, De Kiewit and Walker, both of whom held to a liberal position which located white South African racism in the context of Boer frontier wars, thereby overlooking the role of British bureaucrats, capitalists and trade unionists in creating 20th century South African racism. Otherwise Arendt's references on South Africa are to more-or-less journalistic texts.

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⁸⁰Best, Humanity, 144–146.

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⁸⁶M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, in M.K. Gandhi (Anthony J. Parel, ed.) Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 71.

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⁸⁸Karl, Staging the World, 121.

⁸⁹H.Z. Schiffrin, Sun Yat-Sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univerity of California Press), 307.

⁹⁰Karl, Staging the World, 9.

⁹¹J.L. Hevia, ‘Looting and Its Discontents: Moral Discourse and Plunder of Beijing 1900–1901’, in R. Bickers and R.G. Tidemann, eds, The Boxers, China and the World (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 93–114.

⁹²K. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 184.

⁹³P. Kaarsholm, ‘The South African War and the Response of the International Socialist Community to Imperialism between 1896 and 1908’, in F. von Holthoon and M. van der Linden, eds, Internationalism in the Labour Movement 1830–1940 (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 42–67; F. Tichelman, ‘Socialist “Internationalism” and the Colonial World: Practical Colonial Policies of Social Democracy in Western Europe Before 1940 with particular reference to the Dutch SDAP’, in Von Holthoon and Van der Linden, Internationalism, 87–108.

⁹⁴Kaarsholm, ‘South African War’, 56.