Racist Regimes, Forced Labour and Death: British Slavery in the Caribbean and the Holocaust in Germany and the Occupied Territories

by Colin Clarke

Working Papers WP 24-01
December 2024
ISSN 2192-2357 (MMG Working Papers Print)

Full text: pdf

Abstract:
Professor Colin Clarke’s book Racist Regimes, Forced Labour and Death: British Slavery in the Caribbean and the Holocaust in Germany and Occupied Europe was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2024. Both British and German Nazi empires used slavery and forced labour to target and persecute their racial and ethnic victims, having determined the outcome – often death – by denying them any semblance of civil liberties. Each system was introduced by an expansionist European power, through racist enslavement, transportation, dehumanisation and the destruction of human life.

However, the construction and operation of Caribbean sugar plantations by African and Creole slave labour in the 17th and 18th centuries was different from the mass murder of Jewish and Gypsy civilians in Europe (the Holocaust) and their use as forced labour to manufacture armaments during the Second World War. The contrast is expressed in the following trajectories: for the Caribbean, slave capture in Africa, forced migration across the Middle Passage, sale, seasoning, and being worked to an early death in the gang system of the sugar plantations; and for Occupied Europe, forced migration and forced labour for Jews and Gypsies, where the majority died in work ghettos, or by shooting or gassing, and the remainder were subjected to industrial forced labour in SS concentration camps engaged on Nazi ‘miracle projects’.

Differentiated, as these two events are, however, there is a basis – even a moral need – for comparison. Comparison in this instance rests on four common denominators — racism, colonialism/occupation, forced labour and death. Combined, all four elements in common led inexorably to crimes against humanity and genocide. The juxtaposition of these two historical cases has deep political implications. Both British Caribbean slavery and the Holocaust have given rise to appeals for reparations. But only the Caribbean planters of the post-emancipation era and the victims of the Holocaust since the Second World War have so far received compensation.