Racist Regimes, Forced Labour and Death: British Slavery in the Caribbean and the Holocaust in Germany and the Occupied Territories
by Colin Clarke
Both British and German Nazi empires used slavery and forced labour to target and persecute their 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 scale of the tragedy involving Caribbean slavery (1650-1834) is expressed in the reduction in size of the slave population on the eve of the Abolition of the Slave trade in 1807, when a mere 28 per cent of the 2.7 million Africans shipped to the British Caribbean were still alive. About 350,000 died in the Middle Passage, and mortality during the ‘seasoning’ period took half of new arrivals in the Caribbean before 1700, reducing to one-fourth after 1790 (Morgan 2011). In comparison, the Jewish population of Europe was 11 million when Heydrich reported it to the Wannsee Meeting in 1942; and approximately 6 million were eliminated in 3 to 4 years during the Holocaust in its various phases – the Holocaust by bullets; the deaths associated with the General Plan for the East, the Operation Reinhardt death camps; and the labouring-to-death camps and other associated atrocities (Gilbert 1991; Roseman 2003).
Study of differential incorporation remains a key to unlocking this comparison made here, since it structured or restructured both societies on the basis of winners and losers. The atrocities associated with British colonial slavery and with forced labour in the Second World War and the Holocaust stem directly from different forms of persecution, made possible by targeting selected populations, and stripping them of their civil rights – slaves, free people of colour, Jews, Sinti and Roma. Once denied equality and protection before the law as accorded by citizenship and the suffrage, virtually any abuse could be inflicted on the victims with impunity.
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. All four elements 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.
Without civil rights underpinned by democracy, those targeted for persecution are liable to dehumanization, loss of liberty, exploitation and death – crimes against humanity or genocide, depending on the adjudication; and the reason for their selection will be race or ethnicity or some other fatal designation yet to be chosen.
Racist Regimes, Forced Labour and Death: British Slavery in the Caribbean and the Holocaust in Germany and Occupied Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) is one of the first academic studies to compare the two racist regimes of British colonial slavery in the Caribbean and the Holocaust in Europe. This path-breaking book, published in the Global Diversities series at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, will be of interest to scholars and students of the social sciences and history, particularly those with an engagement with slavery and forced labour, the sociology of race and racism, and Holocaust studies. The text engages separately with each regime in turn, and they are then expertly combined in a concluding synthesis.