Reviewed by Dan Stone, Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 46, 2025, Issue 2, pp 478-479. Published online: 19 May, 2025
Racist Regimes, Forced Labour and Death: British Slavery in the Caribbean and the Holocaust in Germany and Occupied Europe by Colin Clarke, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, 278pp., EUR 119.99 cloth, ISBN 9783031555435
Read Colin Clarke’s response to Dan Stone’s review here →.
Colin Clarke’s book starts from the claim that several common denominators make the comparison between slavery and the Holocaust feasible: racism, colonialism/occupation, slavery/forced labour and death. It is certainly true, as Clarke says, that by undertaking this comparison, ‘one is engaging with the most egregious episodes in European colonial history’ (p.5) – assuming we are agreed that the Nazi occupation was a form of colonialism – but the question remains: how useful is the comparison?
In his review of the (limited) existing literature, Clarke argues that ‘if one shifts the focus from the New World [Steven Katz’s focus in The Holocaust and New World Slavery, 2019]…to the colonial British Caribbean, the contrast between slavery and the Holocaust looks less extreme ‘since in the Caribbean, the ‘de facto’ genocide by planters, based on slave deaths exceeding births and their dependence on importing fresh slaves from Europe…created a thoughtless killing not dissimilar to the Holocaust in outcome (p.11). Clarke then seeks to substantiate this claim through a series of chapters that examine, first, British slavery in the Caribbean, and second, the Holocaust, as separate case studies, before a concluding chapter that brings the two together. Here, as Clarke states in the introduction, he argues that despite major differences – social inclusion at the end of slavery and exclusion and elimination in the case of Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe – there are important points of similarity: ‘legal stratification and the mechanics of socio-racial incorporation were similar in each; Caribbean slavery and the Holocaust form parallel cases when it comes to intentionality to target victims’, he writes (p. 15).
There will be Holocaust historians – and it is important to note that I am writing as one – who will balk at his claim and read no further; after all, the destruction wrought by the Holocaust to Jewish life in Europe can hardly be grasped by the idea that Jews were excluded from citizenship by process of ‘differential incorporation’. Indeed, the term ‘incorporation’ has nothing much to do with the Holocaust at all, which rests on its opposite. Nevertheless, when one considers the destruction of enslaved people’s lives that took place in the British Caribbean before the abolition and the unequal social inclusion that resulted, there is a comparative case to be made.
Clarke offers three chapters, dealing with the establishment of sugar-slave plantations and slave suppression, ‘urban ambiguity’ in the British Caribbean, and the social structure of slave society. Each is rich in detail and each makes compelling arguments. In the first, Clarke argues that ‘prior to 1807 the brutal system had so decimated slave labour that it was akin to genocide’ (p.47). In the second and third, he notes the changes over time in slave society and in urban and rural settlements across the British Caribbean. The following chapters on the Holocaust are well informed and cover the range of topics one would expect to find, including Aryanization, concentration camps, the destruction of Poland, the ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland, the war in the east and the killing process, as well as topics that are not always brought into narratives of the Holocaust such as the Nazi’s General Plan East. It is this topic and that of the Nazi’s use of Jews as slave labourers that makes Clarke’s comparative claims most effective.
Clarke himself concludes that ‘Slavery in the Caribbean and racial persecution in the context of the Holocaust in Europe moved in opposite directions over time: slavery towards the incorporation of freeman and slaves in the 1830s and the Holocaust towards forced labour and elimination’ (p. 234). On the basis of Clarke’s detailed side-by-side narratives of British Caribbean slavery and the Holocaust, one is forced to the conclusion that the two have very little in common, other than in the most general terms; both were violently ruinous of human life. Importantly, from a current-day perspective, Clarke’s comparison renews hope that solidarity between victim groups can be rebuilt, perhaps with a focus on restitution. Beyond that, the Holocaust and British Caribbean slavery have very little in common, and neither should intergroup solidarity require they do so.
Dan Stone,
Royal Holloway, University of London
