Concentration Camps: A Short History

Concentration Camps: A Short History is a concise yet thought-provoking introduction to a sadly ubiquitous icon of the modern age. Along with Nazi Konzentrationslager and the Soviet Gulag, the book examines colonial concentration camps in nineteenth-century Africa and post–World War II enclosures in communist, fascist, and liberal-democratic venues. A concluding chapter pulls together the twentieth century’s many camps under the umbrella of a working definition while also considering the limits of any universal theory. Students and instructors alike will appreciate Stone’s accessible overview of major political theorists. Camps, Stone summarizes, concentrate “superfluous” populations (Arendt) during legal “states of exception” (Agamben) in the name of creating a new society and a new man (Bauman).¹ These definitions do not apply to all “concentration camps” under discussion, however, because the stated theorists tend to enshrine the exceptional case of Nazi Germany as a normative and even exemplary model—a point that Stone acknowledges...