Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876–1903

The British Empire was an empire of camps. Following the model of workhouses to control the poor in Britain, camps were established to isolate the diseased and the famine-starved in India, and rural communities that posed a threat to the prosecution of war in South Africa. This fact, though well known already and well documented for particular locations—as exemplified in, most notably, Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York, 2001)—has long awaited a historian able to bring the story together. In this book, Forth provides such a synthesis, on the basis of wide archival research. His argument is that famine, plague, and war were all connected and that, in the minds of imperial administrators, each of them provided causes for the use of camps: “British imperialism gave rise to a series of interconnected crises, from South Asia to South Africa,...