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
Response by Colin Clarke
The following response by Colin Clarke was sent to the book review editor of Slavery and Abolition with a request that it should be published in the next available issue of the journal. But Dan Stone refused to contest the response, and the editor of the journal was left with no alternative other than to bring the correspondence to a close. The following is an abbreviated version of Colin Clarke’s reply to Stone’s review.
Dan Stone, in his review of my book, takes me to task on four counts. He doubts that the relationship between Germany and the occupied territories was equivalent to colonialism. He rejects the notion that persecution of the Jews by the Nazis can be summarised by the term differential incorporation, though I explain that it means the refusal of political and civil rights to a whole segment of the population (Jews), and point out that it is a term which I also apply the British Caribbean slaves, who were differentially incorporated vis-à-vis white planters and free-coloureds. Once rights were not conceded (slavery) or were removed (Holocaust), victims could be harried to death. I assume that, as a historian of the Holocaust, Stone cannot for some reason countenance the comparison with slavery. But he does agree that ‘a comparative case can be made,’ and he outlines it by setting slavery and the Holocaust side by side, but not making the comparison, which I do in my conclusion. I address each of these issues in turn
Dan Stone queries whether the Nazi occupation of Europe was a form of colonialism. The Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, as I showed, removed Poland from the map, and divided the country between the two occupying powers, Germany and the Soviet Union. Rapidly, the Polish borderlands were integrated into Germany, and soon after that the General Government was set up in occupied Poland as a quasi-colony of Germany under Nazi administration. Less than two years later in 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union and [the] entire area of occupied Poland and the USSR was now subjected to a planning project set out in the SS General Plan for the East. It involved massive forced movements of Slavs – Poles and Ukrainians, in particular, the re-settlement of ethnic Germans, and the extermination of the Jews. Occupation was colonization and elimination.
Early in his review Dan Stone states that there will be Holocaust historians – ‘and it is important to note that I am writing as one’ – who will balk at the claim that Jews were excluded from citizenship in a process known as differential incorporation. Stone fails to recognize that differential incorporation was a tool used by the white elites in colonial systems, both in the British Caribbean and in occupied Europe, to determine who they incorporated into (or excluded from) political and civil rights. In my comparison, neither black Caribbean slaves nor Jews were incorporated, and exclusion in both cases led inevitably to elimination. What Stone fails to see is that, deprived of rights, both black Caribbean slaves and Jewish forced labourers were totally at the mercy of their oppressors, including the threat and enactment of death.
Stone concedes that ‘when one considers the destruction of enslaved people’s lives that took place in the British Caribbean before the abolition of slavery and the unequal social inclusion that resulted, there is a comparative case to be made.’ And indeed I make it, with regard to my three chapters dealing with slavery, four with Jewish persecution and the Holocaust, and a concluding chapter which compares the two systems. Stone then cites me, correctly, as saying 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 freedmen and slaves in the 1830s and the Holocaust towards forced labour and elimination’ (p 234). But the conclusion that Stone draws from these opposed end points is incorrect. He claims that slavery and the Holocaust ‘have very little in common, other than in the most general terms,’ forgetting that slavery ran for 150 years, during which the slaves failed to reproduce themselves, before the slave trade ended and the first steps were taken to incorporate the disenfranchised slaves (and free coloureds).
Stone concludes his review by stating that: ‘Clarke’s comparison renews hope that solidarity between victim groups can be rebuilt, but perhaps with a focus on restitution.’ This gloss by Stone bears scant relation to my book’s conclusion (forming a whole chapter), which instead discusses in detail: 1) the shared basis for differential incorporation and treatment – British Caribbean slavery and the Holocaust; 2) locations of racial and ethnic exploitation – plantations and concentration camps; towns and ghettos; colonization and decolonization; 3) legal claims that the two events represent crimes against humanity or genocide; and 4) examination of the programmes for restitution for both egregious events. Viewing the Holocaust as an event that cannot be compared to any other only serves to obscure rather than illuminate, and thus increases the likelihood of future genocides.
Colin Clarke
Jesus College, Oxford and School of Geography and the Environment
