Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Leo Bader
Guest: Aidan Forth, Professor of History, McEwen University
Episode: “Aidan Forth, Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement (U Toronto Press, 2024)”
Date: September 11, 2025

Overview

This episode discusses Aidan Forth’s new book, Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement, which traces the origins, diversity, evolution, and political functions of mass confinement camps worldwide. Forth challenges listeners to look beyond the familiar cases of Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag, offering a broader narrative that includes colonial, postcolonial, and even present-day refugee and detention camps. The conversation interrogates the definitions of camps, their relationship to modern statecraft, their moral and legal tensions, and their place in national memory.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Expanding the Scope of Camp History

• Beyond the Nazis & Soviets: Forth’s book aims to move “beyond the common paradigms of the Nazi or the Soviet cases” (02:26), showing that mass confinement camps appear in a wide array of historical and geopolitical contexts.
• Wide Range of Cases: The book covers penal colonies, workhouses, prison camps, slave plantations, native reservations, residential schools, colonial concentration camps (South Africa, Cuba, the Philippines, Southwest Africa), fascist camps (Italy, North Africa), capitalist counterinsurgency camps (Malaya, Algeria, Vietnam), and modern cases (Guantanamo Bay, Uyghur camps in China, refugee camps).

  "I do my best to cover a lot of ground and to introduce readers, hopefully, to institutions and types of camps that they haven't necessarily thought about before." (04:58)

2. What Is a Camp? – Definition and Diversity

• Core Definition:

  "Camps, put simply, are demarcated institutions that contain or confine categories of people... as a preventive measure, often in a moment of perceived emergency like war, revolution or economic crisis..." (06:06)

• Common Patterns: Camps are linked to attitudes about space, race, discipline, and labor; they often arise in military or colonial settings and serve both punitive and so-called reformist functions.
• Purposefully Harsh:

  "Camps are, by design, unpleasant places to live. They often lead to a great deal of suffering. They lead to a great deal of death... They deny security, health and safety to the people that they concentrate.” (08:36)

3. Origins and Historical Evolution of Camps

• Industrialization & Modernity: Camps arise with industrial society, reflecting increased state capacity, bureaucratic management, and technological advances (mass-produced huts, barbed wire, electric lighting).
• From Exile to Confinement:

  "For most of recorded human history, if you wanted to deal with deviants, you... either executed them, or you tortured them... or else you exiled them... What we see developing in the 19th century is a new way to deal with deviant groups... to confine them." (10:43)

• First Use of ‘Concentration Camp’: 1900, British South Africa (Anglo-Boer War).
• Total War & Civilian Internment: The logic of confining entire populations crystallizes in the context of late 19th and early 20th-century total war.

  “World War I is not a war between discrete militaries, it's a war between entire societies.” (14:36)

4. Camps and Political Systems

• Modern States and Ubiquity:

  “Modern political systems tend to produce camps. And whether that is an authoritarian system... or a liberal democracy... all of these societies have produced camps. And so camps, in some ways, I would suggest, are ubiquitous.” (16:30)

• Political Culture Shapes Camp Practice: Examples include British vs. German colonial camps, U.S. vs. Nazi WWII camps, and China’s Uyghur camps vs. U.S. Guantanamo.
• The Role of Civil Society & Law:

  "A liberal democracy... has mechanisms that check and stem abuses that may occur in those camps.” (17:38)
  "It’s inconceivable that a Jewish resident of Auschwitz could possibly petition a Nazi Supreme Court for due process and release." (20:45)

• Case Studies:
  • Boer War vs. German Southwest Africa: British camps dealt with public outcry and reform, German camps operated without such checks (18:25).
  • Japanese-American Internment vs. Nazi Death Camps: Notable differences in their legal frameworks and mortality (20:03).
  • Uyghur Detention vs. Guantanamo: Contrasting legalities, scale, and the scope of internment (22:53).

5. Legal Tensions: Camps, Law, & Power

• State of Exception:

  “We often... see camps as sort of extrajudicial, as what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls a state of exception. And indeed, it is very often the case that camps arise in a moment of perceived emergency, where normal judicial procedures are suspended.” (25:25)

• Within and Outside the Law:
  • Authoritarian regimes frequently embed camps into the formal legal system (e.g., the Soviet Gulag, Nazi camps for common criminals).
  • The boundary between camp and prison is often blurred, including in present-day U.S. detention systems (ICE, prison industrial complex).

  “The line between a camp and a prison, it exists, but it's sometimes fine and it's sometimes crossed.” (28:27)

6. Allegories of Modern Mass Confinement: Gardening & Medicine

• The Language of Justification:

  “Different regimes often use similar types of language to justify, to explain, to frame what they're doing.” (29:45)

• Biopolitics (Foucault): Modern governments aim to create healthy, thriving populations but may seek to “quarantine” or “cordon off” those deemed infectious or dangerous.
• Gardening State (Bauman):

  “The goal of the state was to cultivate certain ideas, certain types of people, while cordoning, fencing off other Types, maybe even exterminating other type of people.” (31:53)

• Integration or Exclusion: Camps serve as sites for either reform/assimilation or complete removal/extermination of those deemed problematic.

7. Memory, Forgetting, and the Use of Camps in National Mythmaking

• Selective Remembrance:
  • South African apartheid regime remembered British camps as genocidal (conveniently forgetting Black victims).
  • In Israel, the trauma of the Holocaust shapes national attitudes and justifies enduring security measures.
  • In the Soviet context, remembrance of the Gulag contributed to delegitimizing the USSR, but Putin has since rehabilitated Stalin and suppressed civil society efforts to document camp history.

  “The way that we remember them isn't always necessarily historically accurate.” (34:14) “Forgetting camps is, I think, something we shouldn't do because it can lead to future atrocities. History doesn't necessarily repeat, but sometimes it does.” (38:34)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Diversity of Camps:
  “All in, I do my best to cover a lot of ground and to introduce readers, hopefully, to institutions and types of camps that they haven't necessarily thought about before.”
  — Aidan Forth, 04:58

• On the Definition of Camps:
  “Camps, put simply, are demarcated institutions that contain or confine categories of people... as a preventive measure, often in a moment of perceived emergency like war, revolution or economic crisis...”
  — Aidan Forth, 06:06

• On Politics & Civil Society:
  “A liberal democracy... has mechanisms that check and stem abuses that may occur in those camps.”
  — Aidan Forth, 17:38

• On Law and Exception:
  “We often... see camps as sort of extrajudicial, as what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls a state of exception.”
  — Aidan Forth, 25:25

• On Biopolitics & Allegories:
  “Societies that develop camps talk about a particular group as somehow unhealthy, as a virus, as vermin, as bacteria. They need to be quarantined so that it doesn't infect the rest of society.”
  — Aidan Forth, 30:51

• On Memory and Forgetting:
  “Forgetting camps is, I think, something we shouldn't do because it can lead to future atrocities. History doesn't necessarily repeat, but sometimes it does.”
  — Aidan Forth, 38:34

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Historical Scope & Case Studies (02:26–05:54)
• Defining 'Camp' & Common Themes (06:06–09:39)
• Origins & Evolution of Camps (09:57–16:04)
• Camps and Political Systems (16:04–24:50)
• Legal Tensions: Law vs. Exceptionality (24:50–29:32)
• Gardening & Medicine Allegories (29:32–33:51)
• Memory, Forgetting, and National Myths (33:51–38:44)

Episode Takeaways

• Modern mass confinement camps are not limited to a few infamous regimes; they are a nearly universal feature of modern statecraft, manifesting in diverse political contexts, each with unique forms and justifications.
• The legal, social, and political architecture surrounding camps both enables abuse and (in rare cases) provides avenues for challenge and reform.
• The ways societies remember—or forget—their histories of mass confinement have powerful effects on present-day politics and policy, sometimes fueling new cycles of repression.

For further reading:
Aidan Forth’s Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement (University of Toronto Press, 2024)