Camps in a Time of War

Guerrilla warfare during the South African (or Anglo-Boer) War presented a new context for the development of British camps. On the one hand, camps were a measure of military counterinsurgency that concentrated and detained scattered civilian populations suspected of aiding enemy insurgents. On the other hand, camps were measures of social control and sympathetic concern that organized shelter and humanitarian relief for refugees who had been displaced by scorched earth warfare and were congregating in overcrowded towns. Boer and African refugees presented a specter of social destitution and sanitary disarray familiar from Indian plague and famine operations. Like plague and famine camps, wartime concentration camps removed “uncivilized” and unhygienic populations from the center of towns and systematized ad hoc charitable arrangements by confining relief within demarcated boundaries. Although Boers were ostensibly Europeans respected for their vigor and courage, racialized discourses in the later phases of an asymmetric conflict denigrated them as uncivilized and even subhuman: such representations ultimately facilitated encampment.