The paperback edition of ONE LONG NIGHT, my global history of concentration camps from the 1890s to the present, is out today! You can read more about it on my website: andreapitzer.com. For the next few days, I'm going to post relevant sections to celebrate its arrival.
Where did camps come from? They have many historical forerunners, including penal labor camps in ancient civilizations and under the Tsars in Russia. But the most similar and immediate ancestors of the camps were Native American reservations & parts of the Spanish mission system.
The first point at which a formal policy of reconcentración was deliberately adopted and detention sites called "concentration camps" were built was in Cuba in 1896 under Spanish rule. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were forced off their land and held behind barbed wire.
The US press reported on these camps & attacked Spain, focusing on Valeriano "the Butcher" Weyler, the general who enthusiastically adopted the strategy of reconcentración. Thus began a relationship of mutual loathing & struggle for control of the narrative about the first camps. 
Again and again in defenses of these first concentration camps, US scorched-earth tactics in its own Civil War were brought up. Weyler was regularly compared to Sherman in his dedication to total victory and the willingness to use any means to achieve it.
When Pres. McKinley asked Congress to declare war on Spain in 1898, he condemned the policy of reconcentración as "extermination." But after the US won that war and inherited a rebellion along with territory in the Philippines, the US soon built its own concentration camps there.
Meanwhile, as the Second Boer War raged in southern Africa, the British adopted a similar policy to clear the countryside, putting Boer women & children into what some historians call the first formal concentration camp system. They built separate camps for most black Africans.
Nearby, in South-West Africa, German forces set up camps in the wake of a military campaign against the Herero and Nama peoples. Genocide was the stated policy at the outset of that campaign but was later rescinded. Hard labor in the camps resulted in many more deaths.
This marked the end of the first decade of concentration camps. In that time, they had risen on three continents, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and shocked the world with what was widely seen as a new and deliberate form of military brutality.
Tomorrow I'll talk about why, despite public horror at their toll, concentration camps didn't vanish from the face of the earth.
