"This book explains why concentration camps were created, and how they changed radically in the course of the twentieth century to become instruments of mass terror and genocide. In popular perception concentration camps are synonymous with genocide-racial extermination. Yet the great majority of them were not sites of genocide. Nor were they a Nazi invention. This book shows they were a global and transnational phenomenon, emerging on the colonial periphery of Britain, Spain, the USA, and Germany around 1900. In the aftermath of total war and revolution, 1911 to 1923, one authoritarian state after another reimported colonial counter-insurgency practices and applied the new techniques of mass mobilization and bureaucratic power. This raises questions about continuities from imperial warfare to political repression under fascism and other authoritarian dictatorships. Camps were instruments for empire-building, sites of performative violence, and central elements of utopian schemes of social and racial transformation. They have existed, and continue to exist, under a variety of regimes, including the Soviet Union, imperial Japan, Communist China, and democratic powers. The book views them from the perspective of perpetrators and victims, and examines their lasting legacy in memory and culture. Concentration camps are part of modern civilization, past and present"--