This art icle was downloaded by: [ Universit y of Pret oria] On: 30 August 2011, At : 13: 59 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK South African Historical Journal Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ rshj 20 The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa and the Philippines, 1896–1907 Jonat han Hyslop a a Universit y of Pret oria, Sout h Africa Available online: 30 Jun 2011 To cite this article: Jonat han Hyslop (2011): The Invent ion of t he Concent rat ion Camp: Cuba, Sout hern Africa and t he Philippines, 1896–1907, Sout h African Hist orical Journal, 63:2, 251-276 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 02582473.2011.567359 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Full t erm s and condit ions of use: ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- and- condit ions This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, re- dist ribut ion, re- selling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warrant y express or im plied or m ake any represent at ion t hat t he cont ent s will be com plet e or accurat e or up t o dat e. The accuracy of any inst ruct ions, form ulae and drug doses should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem and or cost s or dam ages what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h or arising out of t he use of t his m at erial. South African Historical Journal Vol. 63, No. 2, June 2011, 251
276 The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa and the Philippines, 1896 1907
JONATHAN HYSLOP* University of Pretoria, South Africa Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 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 warfighting 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. Key words: Cuban Revolt against Spain; South African War; Boer War; American-Filipino War; Herero Revolt; Hannah Arendt; Giorgio Agamben; Michel Foucault On 18 May 1899, at the royal palace of Huis ten Bosch in the tranquil capital of the Netherlands, representatives of all the world’s major powers, and some minor ones, assembled in an international conference. They had come to The Hague at the call of the Tsar of All the Russias. Nicholas II, in an ‘Imperial Rescript’ in August the previous year, had proposed to seek, ‘by means of international discussion, the most effectual means of ensuring to all peoples the benefits of a durable peace and above all of putting an end to the progressive development of the present armaments’.1 The conference sparked worldwide interest, and was indeed a landmark in international relations. It was the first gathering in *Email: jhyslop@colgate.edu 1. A. Eyffinger, The 1899 Hague Peace Conference: The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1999), 17. ISSN: Print 0258-2473/Online 1726-1686 # 2011 Southern African Historical Society DOI: 10.1080/02582473.2011.567359 http://www.informaworld.com Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 252 JONATHAN HYSLOP which representatives of all the most powerful states came together to lay down ‘authoritative statements of international opinion and consensus’.2 The conference did produce some important results, even though to peace campaigners, these were disappointingly limited and reformist, moderating war rather than getting rid of it. It was the Hague Convention that established a system of clear distinctions between combatants, prisoners of war and civilians, and which laid down definite rights and obligations for each of these categories of persons. Certain types of weapons
poison gas, missiles fired from balloons, and expanding ‘dum-dum’ bullets
were forbidden for use in combat. In respect to civilians, the Hague Convention provided a number of important legal protections. An occupying army, among other things, could not force civilians to take part in military operations against their own country, nor force them to swear allegiance to the occupying power, nor infringe upon the ‘[f]amily honour and rights, the lives of persons and private property, as well as [the] religious convictions and practice’ of civilians.3 Most importantly, the conference, realising that it could not foresee all future contingencies, approved the inclusion of a blanket injunction to protect that became known as the Martens clause, after its proposer, a Russian official and legal academic. Feodor Fedorovich Martens drafted the following words, which were incorporated into the ‘Convention Regarding the Laws and Customs of War on Land’, and which have remained a standard point of reference in humanitarian legal discourse: in cases not included in the present arrangement, populations and belligerents remain under the protection and empire of the principles of international law, as they result from the usages established between civilized nations, from the laws of humanity, and from the demands of conscience.4 Yet just two years later, a major political figure in the world’s most powerful nation gave an assessment of developments on the battlefield that was strikingly at odds with the optimism of the Hague moment. In London, on 14 June 1901, the leader of the opposition Liberal party, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, made a speech that was immediately to resound across the country, through the British empire, and around the world. The affable and patrician ‘C-B’ had until that time patriotically deferred to the Conservative government on the South African war. But now he launched a full-scale attack on Lord Salisbury’s administration. ‘When’, he asked, ‘is a war not a war? When it is conducted by the methods of barbarism in South Africa’.5 His words were, oddly, phrased in the standard formula of a music hall joke, as if he were trying to soften their impact. He knew he was taking a risk, for he had a problem in holding together the anti-war radicals of his party, like the young David Lloyd George, and the pro-war Liberal Imperialists. But Campbell-Bannerman appears to have had a genuine crisis of conscience precipitated by the information he was receiving about the war from sources such as the English humanitarian Emily Hobhouse.6 In the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, Kitchener’s 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. G. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 57. Eyffinger, Hague Peace Conference, 316. Eyffinger, Hague Peace Conference, 313. The Times, 15 June 1901. J. Wilson, C-B: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London: Constable 1973). Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 THE INVENTION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP 253 army was systematically leveling Boer farmhouses, burning crops and slaughtering livestock. Boer women and children and African tenants and farm labourers were being interned in camps where they were suffering enormously high rates of mortality from disease. The moment around the turn of the century thus presents us with a remarkable conjuncture. First, an unprecedented involvement of states in attempts to regulate the cruelty of warfare. Second, the introduction into state practice and political discourse of extreme forms of militarised brutalism against civilians, and especially of what was already being called the concentration camp. And third, at a time which we stereotypically regard as the moment of the greatest self-confidence of the west, a serious questioning within European elites of their own claims to civilisation. In his enormously influential writings on the subject, Giorgio Agamben has made the now famous claim that ‘the camp is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet’.7 And much historical work has come to a similar conclusion. Roger Chickering,8 in an influential article, while warning against the teleological tendencies of an argument seeing the rise of modern warfare as steady evolution of ‘total war’, nevertheless concludes that total war is useful concept if understood as involving the systematic and calculated incorporation of civilians as participants, and that it did reach unprecedented levels in the twentieth century. The period since the 1890s has seen a world in which civilians have not just been the casual victims of armies, but in which they have been subject to unprecedented levels of systematised incarceration, conscription, forced labour, violence and mass killing. There has been a surprisingly high degree of agreement amongst social theorists and historians as to when and where the practice and discourse of the concentration camp arose. Almost universally, it has been identified as emerging either in the policies of the Spanish government in response to the revolt in its Cuban colony from 1894, or in British policies in the South African War of 1899
1902, or both. More recently, there has been some general acceptance amongst scholars that aspects of American policy in the war against the Filipinos of 1899
1902 and the German repression of the Herero and Nama revolts in Southwest Africa from 1904 to 1907 also constitute genuine early examples of the concentration camp. And in agreeing that the camps of such colonial wars were predecessors of the vastly more lethal camp systems of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and many lesser dictators, scholars have also recognised their significance for the major catastrophes of the subsequent age. But what scholars have been much less good at addressing are questions of why and how the camp emerged at this time, and of its linkages forward to the practices of major totalitarian countries in mid-century. It is such questions that this paper seeks to explore. Agamben’s treatment of the period is typical of much writing in the field. He simply notes that: 7. 8. G. Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnestota Press, 2000), 37. R. Chickering, ‘Total War: The Use and Abuse of a Concept’, in M.F. Boemke, R. Chickering and S. Forster, eds, Anticipating Total War: The American and German Experiences 1871
1914 (Washington/ Cambridge: German Historical Institute/Cambridge University Press, 1994), 13
28. 254 JONATHAN HYSLOP Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 Historians debate whether the first appearance of camps ought to be identified with the concentration camps that were created in 1896 by the Spaniards in Cuba in order to repress the insurrection of that colony’s population, or rather with the concentration camps into which the English herded the Boers at the beginning of the twentieth century. What matters here is that in both cases one is dealing with the extension to an entire civilian population of a state of exception linked to a colonial war.9 From there Agamben passes on, almost directly, to his central focus on the Nazi camps, without really specifying why this earlier history was significant for what came later. Similarly, Hannah Arendt10 in her Origins of Totalitarianism, which has attracted a great deal of new attention in recent years, polemicizes powerfully on the point that there is a direct connection between the violence of colonialism and the practice of Stalinism and Nazism, but does not really identify the paths of the institutional and ideological continuities between colonial precedents and mid-century totalitarian practice. So what we seem to have is a situation where both major philosophers of history and workaday historians agree that the moment of the turn of the century saw the birth of a new phenomenon, the concentration camp, and that this emergence is somehow linked to the larger-scale global catastrophes that followed. But what they seldom seem able to tell us is why the camp phenomenon developed when it did and why these turn of the century precedents were important for what came afterwards. This paper thus sets out to answer two key questions: why did the concentration camps emerge at this time, rather than earlier or later? And what difference did their existence make
why is it important to assert the link to subsequent events? In this article, I contend that new cultures of military professionalism were crucial to the emergence of the concentration camp in this period. Military professionalism generated military cultures which, despite important national differences, all took instrumental rationality as a core value. The way in which army commanders responded to the tactical and strategic demands of war was centrally shaped by this culture of military professionalism and its attendant logic. Both of these arguments flow from the work of a number of contemporary scholars who take the view that the organised practice of war itself needs to be given a more central place in explanations of twentieth century mass violence against civilians.11 What was new in the military practice of the turn of the century was the willingness of military professionals to take responsibility for organising civilian populations on a macro-social scale. Obviously, throughout the history of warfare, soldiers 9. 10. 11. Agamben, Means Without End, 37. H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966). M. 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. Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 THE INVENTION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP 255 have massacred, raped and plundered civilians, sometimes on a huge scale. But that is not the same as setting out to place entire civilian populations in militarily run, bureaucratically organised institutions. This article suggests that one of the major ways in which the colonial wars of 1896
1907 linked to the horrors to come was through a global diffusion of the concept of the camp, via the new forms and technologies of print media, which spread the idea of the camp as a modern form of management of populations amongst military and political leaders, and to some extent legitimised it in the eyes of civilians. Movements which might have been expected to see the dangerous logic of the war on civilians
socialist and anti-imperialist groups
did not do so, instead sharing many of the assumptions of their military antagonists. Professionalism is understood for the purposes of this article, following the classic sociological work of Morris Janowitz, as consisting in ‘prolonged training [in a] skill which enables [the professional] to render specialized service . . . a sense of group identity and a system of internal administration. Self-administration . . . implies the growth of a body of ethics and standards of performance’.12 The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars marked a seismic shift in the conduct of warfare.13 The period saw a move in European armies away from officer corps dominated by aristocrats or mercenaries and a pervaded by a gentlemanly ethos, and toward a conception of the officer as a professional. Propelled by the changes inherent in armies of a vastly expanded scale, increasingly complex military technologies, and the expansion of state bureaucratic and tax-gathering capacities, this professionalisation process involved crucial institutional changes. It was also pushed forward by the political problems posed by a soldiery who needed to be offered a sense of identification with the state in the context of the spread of revolutionary ideologies and the contingency of military invasions. What were the characteristics of this new military order? First, professionalisation involved the establishment of the General Staff model of military organisation, and introduced bureaucratic-style procedures and forms of planning into military life. The Prussians were the leaders here, establishing their General Staff in 1803. This body together with the organisational reforms of Scharnhorst and Gneisnau in the army during that era became the admired model for reformers in all major countries. This influence was heightened by the prestige accrued by the Germans through their victory over France in 1870
1871. While neither Britain nor America created full General Staffs until the twentieth century, the leaders who instituted the most important organisational reforms in both armies, Edward Cardwell, Secretaryof War in the 1868
1874 Gladstone Liberal government, and General W.T. Sherman during his tenure as Commanding General of the US Army from 1869 to 1883, were both impressed with and influenced by the Prussian example.14 Although the Spanish Army remained organisationally backward, the Prussian model had influence there too. The Spanish 12. 13. 14. M. Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (New York: The Free Press, 1971), 5
6. D.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. S. 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. Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 256 JONATHAN HYSLOP officer corps of the late nineteenth century increasingly drew their intellectual inspiration from Germany.15 The Spanish command in the Cuban Rebellion constituted an energetic if brutal, leadership, capable of considerable organisational feats against weak opponents. Second, with the rise of professionalisation, military science became a distinct academic discipline and separate institutions were established to give appropriate levels of training in it to both junior officers and senior commanders. The Prussians were again the leaders, being the first to establish a standard of educational qualifications for junior officers. Junior officer schools were opened by the British at Sandhurst in 1802 and by the French at Saint-Cyr in 1808. West Point, initially largely a school for military engineers was reorganised by Sherman in the post-Civil War period as a comprehensive institution for training junior officers. Institutions were also established for the further training of senior officers; Prussia’s Kriegsakademie in 1810, the British Staff College in 1857, France’s Ecole superieure de guerre in 1878, and the US Army’s Fort Leavenworth in 1881.16 Third, the military officer corps was (to varying degrees) opened to the middle classes, and decisions on promotion moved away from criteria of social position and seniority and towards merit in active service and educational achievement. In France the aristocratic monopoly over officer’s rank was never re-established after its abolition in the Revolution. In Prussia membership of the officer corps was opened to all social classes in 1808. The British Army abolished the system of purchase of officer’s commissions and of promotions in the early 1870s.17 Spain had a relatively broad social base to the officer corps, although this was more a result of historical contingency than planning.18 It is true that in the British and German cases the officers’ posts in elite Guards Regiments remained largely a preserve of the aristocracy well into the twentieth century, but birth was no longer an impassable obstacle to entry or promotion in most units. A striking, although admittedly exceptional, example in the British case was William Robertson. Robertson, a working class boy, joined the army as a private in 1877, obtained a commission through examinations, and rose to become Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1916.19 The shift toward conscript armies in the European states (except the UK) and the admission of workers in some countries to the electoral franchise in this period, necessitated and propelled new forms of popular political identification with the nationstate.20 But it should not be thought that these changes necessarily led to a democratisation of the politics of the military. As Hew Strachan21 has shown, the evidence favours the argument put forward by Janowitz that armies do not become less politicised as they become more professional. If anything, career officers gained a greater sense of group identity and cohesion in pursuing their newly corporatised political interests. The officer corps of the major countries (including the US) became increasingly politically active in conservative causes in the period 1870
1914 (consider for example the role of the French 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. G. Brennan, The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 57
63. Huntington, Soldier and the State, 19
58, 222
260. Huntington, Soldier and the State, 19
58. Brennan, Spanish Labyrinth, 59. W. Robertson, From Private to Field Marshall (London: Constable, 1921). E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). H. Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 1
19. Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 THE INVENTION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP 257 army in the Dreyfus affair, the British officers militant hostility to Irish nationalism, and the Spanish and US army’s enthusiastic roles in repressing labour insurgency). My argument that the move to professionalism was linked to intensified brutality toward civilians draws particularly on Isabel V. Hull’s brilliant analysis of the military culture of the German Army in the 1870
1918 period.22 Hull shows that the German army developed an extremely tough line on civilian resistance during the Franco-Prussian war, with widespread execution of francs-tireurs partisans, the taking of hostages and massive destruction of civilian property. German military theorists subsequently elaborated a doctrine of military necessity as justifying extreme violence. Hull’s analysis though, has much wider application to the problem at hand. Although the German case was an extreme one, similar processes were at work in other armies. I contend in this article that the Spanish, British and American armies also adopted a brutal instrumental logic of war-fighting. Drawing on Arendt’s On Violence, Hull views war as a process in which the means
violence
tends to overwhelm the ends. In Arendt’s words: The very substance of violent action is ruled by the means-end category, whose chief characteristic, if applied to human affairs, has always been that the end is in danger of being overwhelmed by the means which it justifies and which are needed to reach it. Since the ends of human action . . . can never be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.23 Hull thus argues that ‘militaries, because violence is their business, do not need external ideologies or motivations to encourage excess; and their basic assumptions (the military culture) that develop to handle it may be sufficient in themselves’.24 Armies do not need extrinsic ideological motivations to look for more extreme ways of winning a war. Professionalised training, I would suggest, intensifies these trends because it inculcates a rational-instrumental focus on the means of attaining military goals, but seldom asks questions about ends. The claim that professionalism was conducive to brutality may seem a strange one, as one would imagine that professional soldiers are more likely to be rule-bound than commanders of loosely-organised formations. And indeed, generally they are. But while professionalism created a strong sense that combatants of other countries were members of uniformed regular armies who were worthy opponents, and should be treated decently as prisoners, conversely it led professional soldiers to see irregular troops as having placed themselves beyond the pale of the law.25 Military leaders tended to be selective in their reading of Hague law. They welcomed the protections given to soldiers in formal armies, but were skeptical of the rights which the Hague clearly intended to give civilians. I now want to show how in each of my four case studies, how clearing the population from the rural areas in a ‘scorched earth’ response to guerilla activity led to the invention of the camps. In the subsequent section, I will show that a combined emphasis on the 22. 23. 24. 25. Hull, Absolute Destruction. H. Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), 4. Hull, Absolute Destruction, 324. Janowitz, Soldier and the State; Strachan, Politics; C. Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan (New York: Telos, 2007). Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 258 JONATHAN HYSLOP interaction between the processes of war-fighting and the way in which a culture of military professionalism responded to it explains how this occurred. In Cuba, the rebel general, Maximo Gomez, adopted a policy of destroying the sugar plantations and taking control of rural life. Gomez’s attacks left thousands of plantation workers jobless. What then ensued was a battle between the Spaniards and the rebels for control of the civilian population. Without a livelihood, many of the former plantation workers fled to the Spanish-controlled towns. But the revolutionaries demanded that the civilians move to areas under their control, threatening to shoot anyone found within a league of a Spanish-controlled town or fort.26 The Spanish position declined rapidly as the other leading rebel commander, Antonio Maceo, led an invasion from the rebel-held east of the island into the productive west. This situation set the scene for the Spanish drive to ‘re-concentrate’ the civilian population under its control. In 1896, the Spanish commenced a policy of destroying the huts, crops and livestock of peasantry on a mass scale. It is a mark of the real departure in the conduct of war that the policy of erecting concentration camps represented, that the Spanish commanding general in Cuba, Martinez Campos, recognised its military logic, but felt ethically unable to carry it out himself. War had often involved population movements and looting of civilians, but confinement of civilians on such a scale was a real innovation. Martinez Campos wrote to the Spanish Prime Minister, Canovas, that ‘I could reconcentrate families from the countryside to the towns’. But he feared that this would lead to ‘horrible misery and hunger’. He himself was not willing to do this: ‘I cannot, as the representative of a civilized nation, be the first to give the example of cruelty and intransigence’.27 Martinez’s reluctance represents not a modern legal squeamishness but rather an old-fashioned gentlemanly view of war. His replacement, Valeriano Weyler, in his conduct of the Cuban campaign in 1896
1897 breached all accepted notions of ‘civilized warfare’. During that period half a million people, more than a quarter of the whole population of the island, were moved to concentration camps. Over 100 000 are thought to have died of disease and starvation. The policy was implemented with particular class and political vindictiveness. Wealthy rural dignitaries and their entourages were exempted from ‘reconcentration’ if they could show loyalty to Spain. On the other hand, while people in the camps were allowed to practice agriculture in small plots on the periphery of the towns in order to feed themselves, women and children who were known to have a husband or father with the rebels were not permitted this concession and thus effectively condemned to starvation. In late 1897, following the assassination of Canovas, a more liberal regime came to power in Spain, which then recalled Weyler and ended the reconcentration policy. But most of the refugees had nowhere to go, and mass fatalities from disease continued in the reconcentration areas well into 1898.28 The South African war commenced in late 1899, with a series of major battles, in which the Boers won surprising victories. After the British armies were reinforced and reorganised under Lord Roberts, they commenced an unstoppable march through the Free State and Transvaal in the southern hemisphere Autumn of 1900. As the Boers retreated, they turned to taking guerilla tactics. In reprisal for their attacks on railway lines, Roberts began 26. 27. 28. J.L. Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba 1895
1898 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2006). Tone, War and Genocide, 121. Tone, War and Genocide. Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 THE INVENTION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP 259 to destroy farmhouses, take hostages and impose collective punishments. By the middle of the year the British had overrun all the main urban centers of the Boer states, and the Boers turned to full-scale guerilla warfare, which they were to sustain for a further two years. H.H. Kitchener, succeeding Roberts in command, determined to starve out the guerillas in the field by burning all Boer farm buildings, killing farm animals and destroying crops. This policy was ruthlessly and effectively implemented.29 In South Africa, the Boer women and children and African tenants and farm labourers displaced by the scorched earth policy were interned in concentration camps. The camps were very poorly organised and this led to mass fatalities from disease. There were perhaps up to 45 000 deaths, approximately 25 000 Boers and 14 000 to 20 000 Africans. This can be attributed to a combination of polluted water, unhygienic habits and customs of the inmates, inadequate administration, failure of officials to enforce cleanliness, poor nutrition and inadequate medical administration.30 But Kitchener must ultimately be held responsible, because he willfully ignored the situation in the camps. The catastrophe led to tensions over control of the camps between Kitchener and the British proconsul, Alfred Milner. After Milner set up effective civilian control, and well established public health procedures were followed, mortality rates dropped to fairly minimal levels. A leading historian of the South African camps, S.B. Spies, points out that the policies pursued by Kitchener were in clear violation of the Martens clause.31 Kitchener simply ignored the Hague Convention and had open contempt for the notion of humanity in warfare.32 Milner’s success in making the camps sanitary, and perhaps using them as instruments of modernisation, may have enabled people to imagine a ‘good’ or ‘well-run’ concentration camp, thus respectabilising the idea. Milner in this sense may have rescued the idea of the camp as a legitimate technique of managing populations.33 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. F. Pretorius, ed., Scorched Earth (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 2001). F. Pretorius, ‘Reflection’, in Pretorius, ed., Scorched Earth, 268. S.B. Spies, ‘The Hague Convention of 1899 and the Boer Republics’, in Pretorius, ed., Scorched Earth, 168
177. B. 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. There 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 noncoercive 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, Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 260 JONATHAN HYSLOP In the Philippines, it was by no means certain that the Americans would take occupation of the islands after their defeat of the Spanish in 1898. They could easily have followed the course adopted in Cuba, of granting formal independence under US hegemony. It was in this context that, after destroying the Spanish navy in Manila Bay, the American Admiral Dewey invited Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the recent, unsuccessful Filipino insurrection against the Spanish to return from exile in Hong Kong. But as opinion in the US flowed more and more in favour of annexing the Philippines, a stand-off developed between Aguinaldo’s forces and the US army and marines. On 4 February 1899 fighting erupted between the two sides, and two days later the US Senate voted for annexation. The Americans crushed the Filipinos in a series of set-piece battles in Northern Luzon. The Filipinos then turned to guerilla warfare. Once again, this led to immense devastation. As in Cuba, a relatively restrained commander, General Ewell J. Otis, was replaced by commander who was less concerned with the customs of war. This was General Arthur MacArthur. MacArthur emphasised aggressive pursuit of the guerillas and the infliction of collective punishment, the latter policy a clear violation of the Hague Convention. MacArthur’s approach encouraged officers to push the envelope of legality and this continued after his replacement by General Adna Chaffee. At the end of 1901, Brigadier J. Franklin Bell was ordered by Chaffee to destroy the extensive guerilla activity on southwest Luzon. By 1902 mass destruction of huts, crops and livestock was being carried out in the area. Thus, in the Philippines the Americans pursued the very policies which their popular press had denounced when carried out by the Spanish in Cuba. Bell decreed the arrest of all male members of communities in the region who were not actively assisting the American forces. Finding this insufficient, he went on to decree the killing or capturing of all able-bodied men found outside the towns. In the end, 300 000 rural civilians were forced into ‘protected zones’ in the provinces of Batangas and Laguna. In these camps at least 10 000 died, mainly of epidemic disease. Although earlier estimates of the fatalities directly resulting from American policies appear excessive in the light of more recent research, it is certainly the case that a massive cholera epidemic was generated across the islands by the war, with disastrous results.34 The Americans appear to have started by 34. 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. G.A. May, ‘Was the Philippine-American War a ‘‘Total War’’?’, in Boemke, Chickering and Forster, Anticipating Total War, 437
458; H.W. Smith, ‘The Logic of Colonial Violence: Germany in Southwest Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 THE INVENTION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP 261 waging the war in a quite disciplined way, but in many places their practice spiraled downward into unrestricted violence as they became increasingly frustrated by the guerilla campaign.35 The most heinous incidents occurred on the island of Samar. There, after 38 marines were killed in a surprise attack by guerillas in August 1901, the war evolved into a pattern of vicious reprisals, under the command of General Jacob Smith, a grizzled veteran of the Civil War. On sending Major Littleton Waller into action with a marine battalion, Smith, by Waller’s account, gave the following orders: ‘I want no prisoners. I want you to kill and the more you kill and burn the better it will please me . . . I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms’.36 Smith also told Waller to turn the interior of Samar into ‘a howling wilderness’.37 Although American historians have tended to throw some doubt on how literally these orders were carried out, we do know that Waller, among other things executed eleven of his own porters and thought so little of the matter that he sent Smith a telegram telling him about it.38 Waller was subsequently court-martialled, and as he was unwilling to face the music alone, implicated Smith who was then tried and dismissed from the service. The Southwest Africa case is strikingly similar to the South African and Philippine ones, in that the imperial army had a strong investment in the idea of regular warfare and saw guerillaism as inexcusable. The German army, which had taken criticism in Europe for its execution of French partisans during the war of 1870
1871, was particularly quick to label any form of guerilla war as a punishable breach of the laws of war.39 When the Herero and the Nama revolted against German rule in 1904, there was a gradual intensification of the tactics of the imperial force, even though this was a particularly brutal campaign from the beginning. The German commander, von Trotha, did initially try to restrain his men from killing women and children. But after he failed in his attempt to trap and destroy the Herero forces at the Battle of the Waterberg (11
12 August, 1904), his tactics underwent a further radicalisation. The Herero were systematically driven eastwards into the Omaheke Desert, where they were likely to die of thirst and starvation. Von Trotha established concentration camps for both Herero and Nama. In contrast to the stereotypic reputation of Germany, logistics in the military were particularly poor because of the low prestige attached to non-combat functions by the national military culture. These camps were brutally run, and the diet was far worse than that given to African prisoners in the British camps in South Africa. The death rate, at 45%, was more than twice as high as in the South 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. Africa (1904
1907) and the United States in the Philippines (1899
1902)’, in H. Lehmann and H. Wellenreuther, eds, German and American Nationalism: A Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 205
232; M. Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic, 2002); B. Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005); B. Reyes Churchill, ‘Life in a War of Independence: The Philippine Revolution 1896
1902’, in S. Lone, ed., Civilians in Wartime Asia: From the Taiping Rebellion to the Vietnam War (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007), 29
64; D.J. Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War 1899
1902 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007). Kramer, ‘Race Making’. Boot, Savage Wars, 120. Ibid., 120
122. Ibid., 120
122. Hull, ‘Military Culture’; Hull, military Destruction. Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 262 JONATHAN HYSLOP African camps.40 The worst single incident involved the deportation of 1 800 prisoners to a camp at Shark Island
only 245 survived.41 A particular political dynamic of violence arose from the nature of German national military institutions, and the doctrines that they generated. The term Ausnahmezustande (state of exception) was being used by General Julius von Hartmann at the end of the 1870s in explaining how war suspended all peacetime legal restraints.42 In Hull’s view, rather than the colonial situation generating absolutely new military practices, it provided a more unrestricted scope for the exercise of a set of cultural practices which had already been in use in Europe three decades earlier. For Hull, German military culture manifested the following characteristics; an assumption of the desirability and necessity of quick victories; a low priority to logistical planning; a reliance on the supposed military virtues of officers, whose skills were supposed to bridge the gap between these high expectations of combat success and the low level of practical back-up, and standard operational procedures that involved a high level of brutality. In addition the German army as an institution was crucial to the prestige of the social order of the Reich; it could therefore not be seen to fail without serious political consequences. The German army thus placed itself under great pressure to win definitive victories in a short time, and this then pushed it toward radicalising the means that it used to achieve victory. Dabringhaus43 and Hull44 agree in their accounts of the multi-national Chinese punitive expedition in 1900, that the conduct of the German contingent was significantly worse than that of the other national contingents (which represented all the other major powers) and that this was to do with the specificities of Germany’s military culture. Such a dynamic also showed itself in Southwest Africa, where the German policy towards the Hereros was the worst of all the grim histories recounted here. On 2 October 1904, von Trotha issued the following proclamation: Within the German border every male Herero, armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot to death. I will no longer receive women or children, but will drive them back to their people or have them shot at. These are my words to the Herero people.45 This was a local initiative taken by von Trotha. He deliberately delayed informing Berlin of it, and when his dispatch did arrive, the Chief of General Staff, von Schlieffen, disapproved of the proclamation. It is believed that the Herero were reduced to 20% of their original numbers by the end of the war, and that the Nama population was halved.46 Although the German case may be an extreme one, it is not alone in having provided a space where military ruthlessness and professionalism could come together in a decisive way. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. Hull, ‘Military Culture’; Hull, Absolute Destruction. Smith, Logic, 204 Hull, Absolute Destruction, 123. S. Dabringhaus, ‘An Army on Vacation? The German War in China 1900
1901’, in Boemke, Chickering and Forster, Anticipating Total War, 459
476. Hull, Absolute Destruction. Ibid., 155. Smith, ‘Logic’. Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 THE INVENTION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP 263 I will now proceed to discuss various possible approaches to understanding the appearance of the camps. I will explain why an account based on professional military culture and the process of war-fighting provides a better understanding of this phenomenon than possible approaches based on the generic notions of genocide, theories of biopower and the exceptional state, analyses emphasising the role of racial ideology, or interpretations based on the idea of rational decision making. The sheer brutality of such histories instinctively makes us reach for the term genocide. However, genocide is a legal category, certainly an ethically important one, but it is not necessarily helpful as a basis for sociological analysis. The term was developed by Rafael Lemkin in the 1940s for a very specific and commendable purpose
that of criminalising Nazi violence. As a legal category genocide is, as Mark Mazower47 argues, both too narrow and too broad a concept for the purposes of historians. When the term was used in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention it was made applicable to attacks on ethnic, racial and religious groups, but not to attacks on economic and political groups. (A definition influenced by the Soviet Union, which had no desire to be called to account for its massacres of kulaks and opposition parties48). So some mass murders count as genocide, others do not. On the other hand, while in common parlance we tend to assume that genocide involves intentional dispensing of death to a whole group, the legal definition can include killings without a formalised intention to wipe out an entire group, and can also cover non-fatal acts of suppression of culture. The result is that not all of the numerous instances of large-scale murder in the modern world fit the legal definition of genocide, while some acts not involving violence do fit the definition. It is for these reasons that historians have increasingly begun to use categories such as mass killing or mass violence, in preference to genocide. In the cases under consideration here, there is no doubt of the moral culpability of the armies involved, and that under twenty-first century international law there would be plausible cases for war crimes against most of their commanders. But of these cases, only the German action in South West Africa unequivocally fits the conventional, layperson’s understanding of genocide. I would agree with Mazower49 that instead of becoming mired in debates about whether particular forms of mass killing do or do not constitute genocide, it would be better to ask concrete historical questions about these events, such as the level of intentionality in the perpetrators actions, who organised the violence, what role the perpetrators played in the state apparatus, and how and when the decisions for particular forms of violent action were arrived at. To what extent does such an argument that the path of scorched earth led to the camps complement or point away from the currently influential account of the camp offered by Agamben? Agamben’s position is crucially about law and about biopower. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s theory of the exception he sees the camp as arising in the framework of martial law and the state of siege, which allows the legal state of exception to becomes the norm. But it is also about a Foucaldian concept of biopolitics. Agamben characterises the camp thus: 47. 48. 49. Mazower, ‘Violence and the State’, 1162. S. Power, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 58
59, 68
69. Mazower, ‘Violence and the State’, 1163
1165. 264 JONATHAN HYSLOP Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 Inasmuch as its inhabitants have been stripped of every political status and reduced completely to naked life, the camp is the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realized
a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without mediation.50 Foucault defined biopolitics as aiming ‘to treat the population as a set of coexisting living beings with particular biological and pathological features and which falls under specific forms of knowledge and techniques’.51 This only gets us so far in the cases of the turn of the century camps. While there is certainly a remarkable departure in the scale of the social ambition of military to regulate society, what is striking in all four of the historical cases considered here is the sheer ineptitude of the military management of the biological and pathological features of the camps
in other words, the lack of ‘specific knowledge and techniques’. In the Cuban, South African and Luzon cases, despite the absence of a genocidal intent on the part of the occupying forces, it was the indifference of the military to developing effective techniques of managing the population biologically that led to mass mortality. That such techniques were available is demonstrated by the fact that civilian officials with public health training were able to reduce the deaths in the South African camps when they took over. Of course it may be true that from the point of view of the self-interest of the military, the dire conditions in the camps may have seemed of no concern. As long as the civilian population were in a position where they could not provide the guerillas with food and other materials, they were safely out of the way. And both Kitchener and Weyler were personally notoriously unsympathetic to civilian suffering. Yet in each case considered here, the conduct of the military became a serious international and national embarrassment to their governments
with catastrophic results for the state in the Spanish case, because reconcentration provided American interventionists with a humanitarian rationale for going to war with Spain. The scorched earth strategy may have provided effective military returns for the generals, but it was not necessarily rational from the point of view of the great power interests of national leaderships. Agamben’s appropriation of Schmitt’s idea of the exception to suggest that camp inmates entered a space beyond citizenship or the law certainly captures something of the appalling scenes of devastation that accompanied the establishment of the camps. But although his characterisation may be valid for the camps of the twentieth century totalitarians, it somewhat overstates the legal character of the camps in the period with which we are concerned. Compared with the camps of Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot, these turn of the century camps were very limited affairs in terms of the levels of guarding, violence and discipline to which the prisoners were subjected. And they were not beyond the reach of civil institutions and law. The existence of international law did create space for challenging the military, and indeed for challenges within the military to extremist doctrine. Thus in the South African case, both the cabinet and the Chief of Military Intelligence did 50. 51. Agamben, ‘Means without End’, 40. M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977
1978 (New York: Picador, 2009), 367. Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 THE INVENTION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP 265 resist the attempt by the senior military commander, Lord Wolseley, to rule that the Hague Convention did not apply in South Africa.52 A crucial difference between the British and German cases was that whereas in Britain parliamentarians and bureaucrats could challenge the army, the constitutional structure of Germany, which made the army directly responsible to the throne, isolated it from political scrutiny. Civilian oversight, parliamentary discussion and public debate were crucial in restraining the military.53 When Kitchener tried to radicalise the war in South Africa further, by demanding the banishment of proBoer civilians, the expropriation of Boer property, and the deportation of Boer women and children, he was blocked by senior civilian officials and the cabinet.54 And as we have seen before, public political pressure on the government was crucial to changing conditions in the camps. The new Spanish government of 1897 did recognise Canovas and Weyler had overstepped the bounds of legality and reversed their policies. Senior American officers were held to legal account for their actions on Samar. And even in the German case, the socialist leader Auguste Bebel did mount a powerful campaign denouncing the army’s actions as ‘not only barbaric but bestial’ and equating the Herero resistance to that of the ancient Germans against the Roman Empire.55 This may not be very much to put beside the vast suffering that did occur. But it does mean that the there was a degree of legal and political mediation between power and ‘pure biological life’. It is tempting to see the power of racial ideology, so strong at the turn of the century, as explaining the conduct of Euro-American armies. Contemporary social theory has a tendency to present the role of racial discourse in colonial situations as both extremely powerful and somewhat static. Thus for example George Steinmetz writes that ‘modern overseas colonial practices flowed partly from coloniser’s racial/ ethnographic preconceptions of the people they were colonising
images that preexisted the colonial context and were often quite resilient in the face of countervailing evidence’.56 Certainly a powerful case can be made for this position. There is no doubt that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a high water mark of biological racist discourse, deployed in defence of colonialism.57 Moreover as Gerrit Gong has shown, the distinction between ‘civilised’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘savage’ nations was an important feature of international law in this period, and the standard of civilisation often served as a stalking horse for the idea of race.58 But in contrast, I would suggest that while racial ideology was indeed central in this period, it emerged in an interaction between metropolis and colony, was highly changeable, and was frequently intensified by the experience of war. In this, I follow Paul A. Kramer who has convincingly argued, in the case of the American war against the Filipinos, for emphasising that the ‘contingency and indeterminacy of the process by which . . . racial 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. Hull, Absolute Destruction, 129. Ibid., 129, 184, 193. Ibid., 184
186. Smith, ‘Logic’. G. Steinmetz, ‘Return to Empire: The New U.S. Imperialism in Comparative Perspective’, Sociological Theory, 23, 4 (2005), 341. M. Lake and H. Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Gong, Standard of Civilization, 184. Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 266 JONATHAN HYSLOP ideologies took shape, against the assumption that these ideologies were reflexive ‘projections’ or ‘exports’ from the United States to the Philippines’.59 Kramer notes that that American racial ideologies intensified in response to the war. In particular, he argues, the Filipinos’ use of guerilla warfare was seen by the Americans as marker of uncivilised status in contrast to the idea that the ‘superior’ races conducted formal warfare. As guerilla war deepened, American racism became more extreme. Important to note here is the strong tendency of western militaries to equate formal warfare with civilisation and guerilla activity with barbarism. This interaction between a notion of guerilla war as uncivilised and an increasingly racialised view of its practitioners can be seen elsewhere. A striking variant of this was at work in South Africa. Mainly descended from Dutch, French and German settlers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the Boers were ‘white’ in the commonsense of contemporary racial discourse. At the beginning of the war, during the conventional stage of the fighting, the British had specifically decided not use Indian troops in combat in conformity with the notion that this was a ‘white man’s war’. But the Boer’s guerilla tactics offended the British military’s sense of propriety. The more that the Boers resorted to guerillaism, the less were the British willing to accord them privileged racial status. As the fighting deepened, the British were increasingly inclined to represent the Boers as racially degenerate, miscegenated and ‘uncivilised’.60 J.F.C. Fuller, who served as a junior officer in the imperial forces (and was to become an important British military theorist and ultra-right ideologue), discussed the Boers in astonishingly racist terms when he wrote his memoirs in the 1930s. Fuller described them in these words: Few humans are more uncouth than the average Boer . . . To me there was always something intensely animal about these people. They were brave and resolute, but also cunning and crude . . . They were frequently illiterate, and their ignorance was colossal.61 Whiteness was thus a moveable feast. As Kramer suggests, although racial ideology was important in the era, it was not static but fluctuated in relation to the contingency of war. For this reason, I would be reluctant to see it as, in itself, motivating unrestrained warfare or the introduction of camps. In Cuba for example, colour does not seem to have been a factor in deciding which Cubans were imprisoned in camps. The Spanish strategy in Cuba was not justified in racial terms. The Spanish empire had always made a distinction between those born in Spain and criollos, those born in the colonies. In the Cuba of the 1890s it does seem that the former were more likely to be loyalists than the latter, but this was a distinction of birth, not race. Cubans were ‘reconcentrated’ regardless of colour. In Southwest Africa, racial ideology did play a central role, but its operation can only be understood in relation to the dynamics of military culture. The colonial situation meant that there was greater scope to implement the practices inherent in the military culture, but those practices originated in Europe and pre-existed the war. In Hull’s words, Europeans 59. 60. 61. Kramer, ‘Race-Making’, 171. P. 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. J.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. Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 THE INVENTION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP 267 ‘could try out abroad the techniques, assumptions, doctrines and scripts they carried with them, in an atmosphere relatively unlimited by law and conducive to the application of more force when the first allotment failed to achieve the goal’.62 Racial ideology, then, facilitated the radicalisation of war but did not necessarily drive it; it could also function as an ex-post facto justification of extreme violence. Even at the level of the law, despite the prevalence of racial ideology amongst the major military powers, there was some resistance to codifying racial difference in international or national law on the conduct of hostilities. For example, the attempt of the British military delegate to The Hague to create a provision allowing for the dum-dum bullet to be used in colonial wars was overwhelmingly rejected, in favour of a blanket ban on these bullets.63 While it is certain that there was an element of point-scoring by the European delegates against the British in this, it is significant that a distinction between colonial and metropolitan opponents was not upheld. The legal logic of this decision provided a basis for a notion of universal humanitarian standards. Similarly, US military lawyers’ opposition to the use of torture was explicitly based on a rejection of the idea that a differential legal standard could be applied to different enemies. Protesting a lenient sentence imposed on an officer found guilty of using water torture (today’s ‘waterboarding’) on Samar, the army’s top lawyer, Judge Advocate General George Davis, declared that no modern state, which was party to international law, could passively or actively sanction torture as part of military operations.64 Approaches that argue for the practice of camps arising from purely rational decisions by the military suffer from an inadequate account of discursive practices. For example, Alexander Downes contends that ‘Civilian victimization is a military strategy chosen by political or military elites that targets and kills noncombatants or which fails to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants’.65 Two factors can, separately or together predispose a military organisation’s decision to adopt such an approach: ‘the growing sense of desperation to win and to conserve on casualties that states experience in protracted wars of attrition . . . and the need to deal with potentially troublesome populations dwelling on land that expansionist states seek to annex’.66 Downes emphasises the rational character of such a decision, explicitly rejecting the need to take organisational culture into account. But this does not explain why the concentration camp came into being at a very specific point in time. Over centuries commanders had faced guerilla insurgencies but they had never resorted to the internment of civilians on anything like the scale we have seen in this study. The decisions generals make are historically bound, and forms of rationality are culturally inflected. Commands are issued not on the basis of an abstract rationality, but in the context of particular, historically contingent cultural assumptions which are embedded in institutional structures and practice. What the ideology of military professionalism had done was to open up, at a particular historical point in time, the possibility of an instrumental logic of military success. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. Hull, Absolute Destruction, 233. Eyffinger, Hague Convention, 227. Kramer, ‘Race-Making’. A.B. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 13. Downes, Targeting Civilians, 13. Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 268 JONATHAN HYSLOP Moreover, we have seen that although there was a common direction in the policy of the major military powers there were major national variations in the way that strategy was implemented, and how it was responded to by civilian institutions. This illustrates the importance of the cultural specificity of each army in dealing with the problems facing it. And the modernist rationality of the military leaderships can be overstated. There was a significant disarticulation between the General’s embrace of the latest military techniques and their often profoundly anti-modernist, anti-rationalist anti-urban politics. Such themes were common amongst European intellectuals at this time,67 particularly in the right-wing circles liable to influence military officers. On the German right there was a widespread sense that Zivilzation stood for French artificiality and urbanism as opposed to Kultur which represented German profundity and connection to the soil.68 And this applied strongly to the military modernisers, The senior German staff officer Colmar von der Goltz wrote admiringly of the benefits derived by the Boers from their religious devotion, showing to ‘the living generation of Europe the practical significance of ideal goods such as faith, freedom and fatherland can only be of use and benefit’ and also of the Boers’ ‘simple, hard’ way of life: ‘Only through such a school can there be trained men who wage a desperate struggle for years . . . Our European cities do not produce such natures.69 In Britain military hostility to contemporary urban life was almost equally intense, and was reinforced by deep tendencies in this direction amongst the intelligentsia.70 General Sir Ian Hamilton saw the Boers’ military success as rooted in their ‘backward’ way of life, while Field Marshall Lord Wolseley (the original of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Very Model of a Modern Major-General’) thought that the popularity of singers and ballet dancers was evidence that the British nation was sick. After leaving the military, Lord Roberts spent much of his time campaigning for compulsory national service, instead of a volunteer army, not only for military reasons, but also because he saw it as a way of imposing social discipline on a corrupted nation.71 What then does link the camps of the fin de siècle, to those that have arisen from the mid-twentieth century to the present? In her 1951 book, Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt traced the roots of Nazism and Stalinism to the process of colonisation, especially in Africa: ‘Two new devices for political organization and rule over foreign peoples were discovered during the first decades of imperialism. One was race as a principle of the body politic, and the other a bureaucracy as a principle of foreign domination’.72 These come together in the colonial setting in what Arendt calls ‘adminstrative massacre’; but the full potential of the combination of race and bureaucracy, in her view, was only to be realised by the European totalitarians at home. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. H.S. Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890
1930 (Brighton: Harvester, 1979). N. Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 3
34. F. 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. R.Williams, Culture and Society 1780
1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958); M.J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). T.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. Arendt, Origins, 186. Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 THE INVENTION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP 269 Arendt’s is an extremely suggestive line of thought which has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention of late.73 But it has three main defects from the point of view of our present concerns. Firstly, although the idea of a linkage between bureaucracy and race is intuitively persuasive, Arendt does not specify the means by which this colonial-made fusion was drawn back into the political conflicts of Europe. Secondly, Arendt does not examine closely how the concentration camp made its first historical appearance. Thirdly, her (rather thinly researched)74 account of South African history actually makes the course of events there rather puzzling. Arendt identified the Boers as the archetypal violent western perpetrators of race thinking. Boer conduct towards Africans in the nineteenth century certainly included large elements of violence, racism and coercion (as well as strong strands of negotiation, paternalism and economic competition). But the nineteenth century Boer states were characterised precisely by the weakness of their bureaucratic and administrative structures, and modern ‘scientific’ racism had almost no influence amongst the Boers in that era. It was not the Boers but the British who brought effective colonial conquest, strong bureaucratic government, and biologistic racial ideology to southern Africa.75 At the time Arendt wrote her Origins, the idea of a conjunction of race and bureaucracy was an extremely perceptive description of the newly emerging system of apartheid. But it bore little relation to the nineteenth-century Boer states; Arendt seems to have projected what Afrikaner nationalists were doing in the 1950s back to the turn of the century. Her account of South Africa was at best a creative misreading. Hull’s argument, by connecting turn of the century German military practice and knowledge with the later practice of totalitarianism identifies a path of direct connections between early twentieth century events and the Holocaust. Unlike Arendt, she is able to show exactly how these events were linked. I would argue that similarly focused studies of different national military cultures would enable us to construct other genealogies of repressive practices for different armies. Peter Holquist’s work for example, suggests how similar ideological linkages between Russian military practice, knowledge, and the Soviet camp system might be traced. Western commentators, including Arendt, tend to forget that the Soviet Union had a great Asian empire of its own. Russian military practice in this empire is crucial to understanding the development of the Gulag. Holquist writes that [f]or most of Europe, the exercise of more or less unlimited violence was as yet geographically circumscribed to colonial territories . . . In Russia, however, the boundary between ‘‘colony’’ and ‘‘metropole’’ (as well as between the correspondingly different attitudes and methods of rule) was much less clear to begin with. Moreover, the 1905 73. 74. 75. R.H. King and D. Stone, eds, Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide (New York: Berghahn, 2007). In 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. S. Marks and R. Rathbone, ‘Introduction’, in S. Marks and R. Rathbone, eds, Industrialization and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness 1870
1930 (London: Longman, 1982), 1
43. 270 JONATHAN HYSLOP Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 Revolution had gone some way toward eroding the boundary between a colonial realm of militarized ‘extraordinary rule’ and a domestic civil realm.76 The experiences of 1896
1907 placed the notion of the concentration camp into global circulation as a military ‘solution’. The coverage of the camps in the new print media provided powerful weapons to military leaderships in defending and respectabilising their existence. New publics had been created, over the previous decade by vastly expanding presses both in the metropolitan and the colonised world, and the consolidation, over the previous three decades, of instant intercontinental communication via the undersea telegraph cable. This enabled, in the incisive words of P.K. Datta, a simultaneity which did away with ‘the fundamental distinction between the originative space of the event and the space of its social impact’.77 In other words the fighting of war and the responses of political actors in both metropolitan and colonised countries interacted in something approaching what we would now call real time, a phenomenon utterly unknown in the first half of the nineteenth century. At that point the political culture of the metropolitan power, and its rivals, and the politics of anti-colonial movements in other countries, could become a material factor in the conduct of a war. The 1899 Hague Conference was itself a milestone in the production of the ‘media event’. It constituted the first international conference of states to be accompanied by a major flurry of activity by what we would today call ‘NGOs’ and the international press.78 It became the focus of the hopes of the strong ‘peace movement’ which had emerged in the major countries. Such redoubtable representatives of that viewpoint as the novelist and activist Bertha von Suttner and the journalist W.T. Stead arrived in the Hague to lobby the delegates and to cover the proceedings in the press. Military leaders were able to shape the debate on methods of warfare and active in doing so. As Geoffrey Best convincingly argued, in the late nineteenth century, there was not only a self-proclaimed peace movement, but also what he calls a ‘war movement’,79 exalting military struggle. The latter operated in a similar way to the peace movement, through national lobby groups, printed media and agitation. It is striking that military lobbies, far from seeing the peace groups as a paper tiger actually feared very much the encroachment of law onto their terrain.80 Whereas the peace movement emerged from an expanding bourgeois culture, ‘ill at ease . . . with the brutalities of war’,81 the war movement can be thought of as emerging from rightist populism and military establishments. Both were able to benefit from the rise of mass-circulation print media. But this was a competition in which the party of peace was generally beaten by the party of war: no pro-pacifist organ could remotely rival the sales of the pro-war papers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer in the United States and Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail in the United 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. Holquist, ‘Violent Russia’, 638. P.K. Datta, ‘The Interlocking Worlds of the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa/India’, South African Historical Journal, 57 (2007), 35
59. G. Best, ‘Peace Conferences and the Century of Total War: The 1899 Hague Conference and What Came After’, International Affairs, 75, 3 (1999), 619
643. G. Best, Humanity in Warfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 131. Best, Humanity, 144
146. A. Roberts, ‘Constraints on Warfare’, in M. Howard, G.J. Andreopoulos and M.R. Shulman, eds, The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 5. Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 THE INVENTION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP 271 Kingdom. Pulitzer and Hearst’s promotion of the Spanish-American War and Northcliffe’s role in selling the Boer War demonstrated that they were great powers in their respective lands. In the process the discourse of the concentration camp was prepared for future use. An interesting example is provided by the Russian case. Holquist82 has found that there was a great deal of reporting by Russian military officials on the measures imposed by the British in South Africa during the 1899
1902 war, and that the earliest published uses of the words konsentratsionnyi lager (concentration camp) in Russian occur during this period. The term was revived by the Soviet regime to describe the camps it established during the revolution. The first mention of the concentration camp in Soviet official discourse appears to have been by Leon Trotsky on 4 June 1918 when he called for Czech soldiers fighting against the Bolsheviks to be placed in such camps.83 Trotsky had avidly followed the South African events in his youth84 and this is the probable source of his familiarity with the term. Less than two weeks later, in an official document, Trotsky recommended to the government that the ‘kontslager’, as the term came to be contracted, be used to confine members of the bourgeoisie who were being compelled to do war work.85 One reason that the idea of the camp became current was that it was not effectively contested by radical social movements in both the metropolis and the colonial world. Socialists and anti-colonial nationalists did not reject the discourse of civilised (and thus, in the context of the time professionalised) warfare, but rather sought to redefine it in a way appropriate to their struggles. It tends too easily to be assumed today that the discourse of the superiority of civilisation to barbarism was simply the property of imperial power-holders. But in fact a claim to defend civilisation against barbarism was common among the most radical anti-imperialists of the age. Even Gandhi in formulating his critique of modernity made the claim for the status of India as a civilisation, and as a morally superior order to that of the west: Civilisation is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty . . . The tendency of Indian civilisation is to elevate the moral being.86 Gandhi of course was an exceptional pacifist, but anti-colonial leaders of a less peaceful temperament made the claim to civilisation not just for their indigenous cultural order, but also for their way of war. Thus they overturned the standard identification of formal war with civilisation. They reversed the signs of Euro-American discourse by portraying guerilla warfare as the truly modern form of fighting which would provide an accelerated route to national independence. This explains a notable, counter-intuitive phenomenon of the time: the popularity of the Boers amongst Chinese and Filipino revolutionaries.87 In 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. Holquist, ‘Violent Russia’, 636. A. Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Random House, 2003). I. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879
1924 (London: Verso, 2003), 46. Applebaum, Gulag, 8. M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, in M.K. Gandhi (Anthony J. Parel, ed.) Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 71. Anderson, Under Three Flags; R.E. Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 272 JONATHAN HYSLOP her analysis of Chinese nationalism at the turn of the nineteenth century, Rebecca E. Karl has demonstrated how for Chinese radicals of this period, ‘The Boers . . . revealed the modernity of Africa just as the Filipinos revealed the modernity of Asia, both convincingly demonstrating their ability to . . . [unite] and to struggle’.88 This was far from being empty talk: the nationalist leader Sun Yat-Sen was a strong admirer of how the Boers had conducted their struggle, and incorporated the lessons he had drawn from his studies of their tactics into military training classes he gave in 1903.89 Sun wrote ‘We are a people of a perished nation . . . Yet an ethno-nation [minzu] called Transvaal in South Africa consisting of only 200 000 engaged the British before succumbing . . . Han people, shall we take our subjugation lying down?’.90 The lessons that Asian nationalists chose to learn from the Boers were about the efficacy of anti-colonial guerilla war rather than about the humanitarian issues relating to the position of civilians in that new warfare. Consequently, although the brutality of colonial armies was criticised, the radical thinkers of anti-colonialism gave relatively little attention to the concentration camp and other new practices of violence. Gandhi’s great work, Hind Swaraj, is a salutary exception in that it does subject both western and anti-colonial practices to scrutiny in terms of the danger of the means overtaking ends in the practice of violence. In doing so Gandhi stakes a claim to attention as a serious political philosopher in a way which anticipates the argument of Arendt’s On Violence. He sounded a warning for the consequences of militarism, but his was a relatively isolated viewpoint within the field of anti-colonial literature. Although the wars of the era enabled political radicals in Europe and the US to question the civilisational credentials of their own national leadership to an unprecedented extent, it led only to very partial questioning of fundamental colonialist and militarist assumptions. Indeed what is striking is that North American and European liberals were often more to the fore than socialists in anti-imperial politics during this period. In America critics of imperial policy, like those of other countries, weighed in on the question of barbarism versus civilisation. In the case of the 1900 China expedition American writers hostile to the war, including Mark Twain, frequently attacked the ‘uncivilised’ conduct of the allied troops, especially in relation to the massive looting of antiquities that had taken place.91 This motif was also adopted by American critics of the war in the Philippines. Thus for example, in one Congressional debate, Representative John C. Sibley, Republican of Pennsylvania, commented on the campaign: ‘This is not civilization. This is barbarism . . . We are taking boys who left Christian homes, full of love of country, of patriotism and of humanity, and brutalizing them’.92 In Britain Jamier Keir Hardie’s Independent 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. Karl, Staging the World, 121. H.Z. Schiffrin, Sun Yat-Sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univerity of California Press), 307. Karl, Staging the World, 9. J.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. K. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 184. Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 THE INVENTION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP 273 Labour Party, the SDF and most leading trade unionists took an anti-war stance. But the radical wing of the Liberal party was, overall, much more to the fore of ‘pro-Boer’ agitation. The European left were initially reluctant to champion the Boer cause because the right had been so prominent in its defence (often on a chauvinistic, anti-British basis).93 And a great problem for the European socialists who did take up issues of the conduct of colonial warfare was that imperialism was in general popular outside the hard core of socialist supporters and radical liberals. Thus when the German Socialists blocked the legislative passage of funding for the Southwest African military campaigns, on the grounds of the inhumanity with which the war was being conducted, they were hammered in the subsequent ‘Hottentot Election’, losing more than half their seats in the Reichstag. Most European socialist discussion at the time did not develop a systematic critique or of the logic of anti-civilian violence within the practice of the military or of colonial administrations. To a large extent this could be traced to the progressivist and militarist logic of Marx and Engels’ own thought, on which socialists could draw for authority. Marx’s notion that only the displacement of rural society by capitalism could provide the basis for socialism had famously been defended by the founding father in his articles welcoming the progressive effects of British rule in India, while Engels had seen even the conquest of Schleswig-Holstein by Prussia as representing the right of ‘Zivilisation gegen Barbarei’.94 Generally, in the 1890s European socialists were critical of specific elements of European policy abroad and of the way in which expansionism bolstered certain elites, but not of colonialism itself. Conclusion The idea of the camp was to retain its close connection to war. The Gulag came out of the Russian Civil War. Though Hitler did set up concentration camps when he came to power in 1933, it was the war on the Eastern Front which unleashed the process of mass concentration and extermination camps, subjecting and destroying whole populations. This paper has sought to show that the invention of the concentration camp involved both new military practices and new political discourses. The concentration camp arose as the response of new, professionalised military cultures to the challenge of guerilla warfare. The instrumental logic of violence led to the coercive and callous reorganisation of civilians on a mass scale, as a means of containing and controlling subject populations. Thus military establishments were able to add the practice of the concentration camp to their repertoire. But the new simultaneity of war-fighting and global political debate and action, enabled by the technologies of the telegraph and the mass circulation press, meant that the wars in which the concentration camps arose were also media wars. And that brought the 93. 94. P. 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. Kaarsholm, ‘South African War’, 56. 274 JONATHAN HYSLOP concept into the consciousness of the young future leaders of major authoritarian movements. The concept ‘concentration camp’ had been projected into the realm of political and military life, where it lay like an unexploded shell, awaiting its future moment of detonation. Downloaded by [University of Pretoria] at 13:59 30 August 2011 References Agamben, G., Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnestota Press, 2000). Anderson, B., Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005). Applebaum, A., Gulag: A History (New York: Random House, 2003). Arendt, H., The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966). Arendt, H., On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970). Bell, D.A., The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). Best, G., ‘Peace Conferences and the Century of Total War: The 1899 Hague Conference and What Came After’, International Affairs, 75, 3 (1999), 619
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