THE FIRST CONCENTRATION CAMPS

I just finished reading GULAG: A History by Anne Applebaum and I can recommend it to anyone who doesn't know much about this truly enormous Soviet repression system.

She provides some interesting background information on page xxxiv:

By concentration camps, I mean camps constructed to incarcerate people not for what they had done, but for who they were. Unlike criminal prison camps, or prisoner-of-war camps, concentration camps were built for a particular type of noncriminal civilian prisoner, the member of an "enemy" group, or at any rate of a category of people who, for reasons of their race or their presumed politics, were judged to be dangerous or extraneous to society.

According to this definition, the first modern concentration camps were set up not in Germany or Russia, but in colonial Cuba, in 1895. In that year, in an effort to put an end to a series of local insurgencies, imperial Spain began to prepare a policy of reconcentracion , intended to remove the Cuban peasants from their land and "reconcentrate" them in camps, thereby depriving the insurgents of food, shelter, and support. By 1900, the Spanish term reconcentracion had already been translated into English, and was used to describe a similar British project, initiated for similar reasons, during the Boer War in South Africa: Boer civilians were "concentrated" into camps, in order to deprive Boer combatants of shelter and support.