Sixteenth-century forced relocation anticipated Boer War concentration camps

Evidence

Spanish policy now took the form of schemes for the enforced relocation of Muslims. The justificatory arguments for this policy sound very similar to the arguments for the setting up of the British concentration camps during the Boer War or the various movements of population undertaken during communist insurrections in Malaysia and then elsewhere in Southeast Asia: In order to reduce the rebels to extreme want, nothing would be more effective than to deprive them of the peaceful Moriscos (moriscos de paces) who remained in the Kingdom of Granada. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1057

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The author explicitly maps imperial relocation as a recurring counterinsurgency technique across centuries — this is a genuinely paradigm-shifting frame worth sitting with around how ‘humane relocation’ ideologies recur.
• SEED: An essay could trace the lineage of ‘relocation as humanitarian counterinsurgency’ from Islamic Spain through Boer camps to modern ‘strategic hamlets’ in Vietnam and elsewhere.
• QUESTION: What were the exact ‘justificatory arguments’ Harvey is about to lay out, and how do they map onto the Boer War rationale of separating combatants from their support base?