Concentration camps emerged from colonial administration, not just European totalitarianism.

Evidence

In pointing out that the slave plantation was a space of exception, Paul Gilroy reminds us not to overlook ‘how colonial societies and conflicts provided the context in which concentration camps emerged as a political administration, population management, warfare, and coerced labor.’ It is the idea of a modern civilization encountering a pre-modern one that produced the colonial world as ‘a permanent, tropical exception from common law applicable in Europe,’ Hansen and Stepputat note. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 49

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism claim that colonial violence was the training ground for European camps.
• CANDY: A striking, quotable counterintuitive point: the Nazi camp had colonial, not European, administrative roots.
• SEED: An essay tracing the plantation and colonial camp lineage into contemporary detention facilities like Guantanamo.