Aidan Forth, “Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903” (U California Press, 2017)

Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast · Apr 24, 2018 · 1h 6m

In his new book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (University of California Press, 2017), Aidan Forth employs a comparative and trans-imperial approach to map a global network of camps established by Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1876 and 1903, officials set up famine, plague, and wartime concentration camps across India and South Africa in response to a number of interconnected global emergencies. Situating these imperial camps within a longer tradition of Victorian reforms, Forth argues that, while the camps ostensibly…