He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement, and reported the following:
Camps: A Global History examines mass confinement across a broad historical canvas. Early chapters explore workhouses, labor colonies, slave plantations, and the many camps of the colonial world. Later chapters turn to Guantanamo Bay, the mass internment of China’s Uyghurs, and the detention of Palestinian refugees. A central challenge—and central payoff—of a book of this nature is to recognize diversity while highlighting patterns and practices that have recurred across multiple historical contexts. Page 99, near the beginning of chapter 4, sees this process in action. The focus is an infamous site of mass confinement: the Soviet gulag. As a short, synthetic work, Camps cannot possibly offer a thorough or definitive history of this richly studied topic. Instead, the goal is to draw connections and comparisons with other times and places—and in the process, to shed new light on a familiar subject.Learn more about Camps at the University of Toronto Press website.
Following a brief consideration of the gulag’s pre-history, including penal exile in Tsarist Siberia and Civil War counterinsurgencies against guerrilla rebels, page 99 examines Soviet collectivization in the 1930s. Rarely discussed in scholarship framed by national rather than global history, military and colonial dynamics were crucial to the gulag’s development. Class warfare was more than metaphorical, page 99 argues, as Bolsheviks approached the Soviet countryside like “a foreign country to be invaded, occupied, and conquered.” As Jozef Stalin noted, western countries had funded industrialization through the “‘merciless exploitation’ of colonial peoples.” Yet, with “no (overseas) colonies ‘to plunder’,” the Soviet Union “squeezed its own peasantry”—conceived with dehumanizing, often colonial tropes—in a campaign more violent “than nineteenth-century enclosure or the concomitant consolidation of colonial holdings.” Such practices generated resistance from Ukrainian partisans, Islamic Basmachi militants, and land-holding kulaks, who were incarcerated, en masse, as “an act of virtual war.” In this way, at least, the gulag resembled “the colonial camps of Cuba and South Africa (chapter 3)…[and] the ‘strategic hamlets’ and ‘new villages’…[of] Malaya and Vietnam (chapter 7).” And yet, the chapter cautions, the gulag increasingly functioned in a “world of…paranoid conspiracies rather than real insurgencies.” As such, a revolutionary “plot mentality,” inherited from the French Revolution, along with tactics of authoritarian rule shared with Nazi Germany and Communist China, complemented structures of colonial and military occupation in the Soviet countryside.
The Page 99 Test: Barbed-Wire Imperialism.
--Marshal Zeringue
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