Book Talk – Concentration Camps: A Global History

is delighted to host Professor Alan Kramer in conversation with Professor Dan Stone about Professor Kramer’s new book: Concentration Camps: A Global History.

Why were concentration camps created? In popular perception concentration camps are synonymous with genocide—racial extermination. Yet the great majority were not sites of genocide, nor were they a Nazi invention.

Concentration camps were a global and transnational phenomenon, emerging around 1900 on the colonial periphery, revived during the First World War, and applied in the inter-war years using modern techniques of mass mobilization and bureaucratic power.

Camps served political repression under authoritarian dictatorships and were also instruments for empire-building and utopian schemes of social transformation. And some, in the Nazi empire, were purpose-built for mass M**der. Yet they have existed under a variety of regimes, including democracies, imperial Japan, and Communist China. Concentration camps are thus part of modern civilization, both in memory culture and in reality.

Alan Kramer was Professor of European History at Trinity College Dublin until 2019; he is now Senior Professor of Global History at the University of Hamburg, and Principal Investigator on the ERC Synergy project ‘BLOCKADE – The Hidden Weapon. Blockade in the Era of the Two World Wars.’

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of over 100 scholarly articles and some 25 books, including, most recently: The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Penguin, 2023); Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (OUP, 2023); Psychoanalysis, Historiography and the Nazi Camps: Accounting for Survival (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); and volume 1 of The Cambridge History of the Holocaust (CUP, 2025; co-edited with Mark Roseman). His next book is a history of the Holocaust in Romania, to be published by Penguin in early 2027.

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