Incarceration in Britain and its Empire

At the end of the nineteenth century a series of empires began to use confinement as a policy against the enemy, including the USA and Germany,[1] both of which would continue this practice into the twentieth century, especially in the era of the two World Wars.[2] But the polity which would utilise this policy most extensively consisted of the British empire, against a series of enemies, whether on the British mainland, individual locations within the empire, especially as a policy of counterinsurgency, or by capturing military prisoners and holding them throughout the theatres of war in which the country participated during both World Wars. While Britian played by the rules of war in many cases, it did not in others. This piece outlines the main phases of the history of British incarceration, moves on to discuss the extent to which this polity played by the rules, and then looks at the importance of the National Archives (UK), particularly the documents contained within The Laws of War: Justice, Rights, and Ethics in Military Contexts, a primary source collection curated and published by British Online Archives (BOA), for reconstructing this history.

            Britain had already begun using camps in late nineteenth century in India for the purpose of housing paupers, criminals, and insurgents, impacting on as many as 10 million people.[3] The South African War of 1899–1902 meant the incarceration of as many 116,000 whites together with 115,700 black people here^[4] while some people experienced deportation to St Helena, Ceylon, and Bermuda, with as many as 9,000 making their way to India, living in 17 camps, initially in the Punjab, Bengal, Madras, and Bombay commands.[5] Concentration of civilians had developed during colonial wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, largely as part of a counterinsurgency policy in an age when the distinction between civilians and soldiers as actors in wartime became increasingly blurred.^[6] 

This lack of distinction became more apparent during the First World War and would reach its apotheosis during the second. As during the South African War, the British empire operated on a global level. From the point of view of civilians, this meant that any enemy alien male, above all Germans, resident in any part of the globe, would face incarceration, either in the place where they lived or in one of a series of hubs as the Great War progressed located in Great Britain, Canada, South Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand. All of these locations also housed people taken off ships in any part of the world as the Royal Navy ruled the waves.[7] These actions impacted upon tens of thousands of people, whereas the global conflict in which Britain became involved meant that by January 1919, following the German surrender, Britain held a peak worldwide total of 507,215 prisoners of war, including 343,512 Germans and 119,159 Turks. 128,043 were held in the UK, overwhelmingly Germans, while 199,840 found themselves in France.[8] At the same time, the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 also meant the incarceration of Irish republicans.[9]

The imprisonment of political prisoners would continue throughout the British empire during the interwar years, especially in colonies striving for independence, whether this involved violence or not, including India[10] and Cyprus.[11] The Second World War resulted in the second peak of British imperial incarceration, once again, because of the scale of the conflict, as during the Great War. As in the earlier conflict, civilian internment also took place, in this case impacting even on refugees who had fled the Nazis, with deportation of this group also taking place to Australia and Canada.[12] However, once again, Britain held vast numbers of military prisoners during this conflict on a global scale, totalling over a million at the end of the conflict, some of whom would not return home until 1947.[13] The wars of independence from British rule which took place after the Second World War also resulted in the use of incarceration, if on a smaller scale, as part of a wider policy of counterinsurgency, especially in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus.[14] Internment without trial did not end with the wars of liberation from British imperialism. In the late twentieth and twenty-first century, those who fell victim to this process included Irish republicans,[15] immigrants, and refugees, even as multicultural Britain emerged,[16] and political prisoners, as the example of Palestine Action demonstrates.[17]

The extent to which the British empire played by the rules of warfare depended on the situation which existed, even though it signed the various iterations of the Geneva and Hague Conventions, in which the protection of prisoners remained key. Although the decision to intern civilians in both World Wars remains questionable, and although aspects of this incarceration have also raised serious questions, including the mixing of Nazis with Jews in camps during the Second World War, as well as the deportations which took place to Australia and Canada,[18] there remained relatively few examples of deliberate mistreatment, especially during the First World War, whether within Britain, or in the other parts of the empire where incarceration occurred.[19] The situation remained different on the European continent during the Great War, where most of the German prisoners captured by the British remained, facing mistreatment in the same way as those detained by French and German forces.[20] During the Second World War and its aftermath, the British generally played by the rules in terms of the way in which they treated military prisoners, whether those brought to Britain or those captured elsewhere, but instances of mistreatment certainly existed, especially when it came to interrogation.[21] On the other hand, the reaction against insurgents demonstrates that the British authorities ignored the rules of warfare, perhaps because of the fact that the issue of whether or not a wartime situation existed became ambiguous, at least through the eyes of the retreating imperial masters, but also because the British rulers reacted badly to what they viewed as terrorist activity within the areas where they came under attack in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus, which not only resulted in the killing of British soldiers, but also the death of families of those serving in the military. British counterinsurgency involved a series of measures which impacted upon the entire civilian population in the areas which revolted against imperial rule and included summary execution, curfews, and also mass incarceration, at least temporarily.[22]

The reconstruction of the history of incarceration in the British empire involves a variety of sources, but those held in The National Archives (UK), some available on this website, prove invaluable. For example, any examination of the experiences of internment during the Great War will need to utilise FO383, the papers of the Prisoners of War Directorate, Prisoners of War and Aliens Department which carries the subtitle of General Correspondence and continues until 1919, holding all surviving material on the experiences of military and civilian prisoners all over the world, whether captives of the British, or British prisoners who experienced incarceration. This collection of several hundred files, contains a wide variety of information, not simply correspondence between the British government with other states with which it was at war, usually through intermediaries, the US and then Swiss governments in the case of Germany, but also a variety of other information, including inspections of individuals camps carried out in Britain by the US and then the Swiss Embassy. BOA’s The Laws of War: Justice, Rights, and Ethics in Military Contexts contains papers held by the Home Office, essentially HO45, responsible for aliens both in peace and war, while other documents come from WO32 (i.e. War Office) documents covering the position of prisoners of war complementing the material held in the two Home Office and Foreign Office class lists indicated above. Similarly, files housed at The National Archives prove crucial for understanding counterinsurgency operations, because they provide basic information from an operational point of view, but also give facts and figures of those who faced internment.

Incarceration without trial remained a central instrument of control and coercion in the evolution of modern Britain and its empire, impacting upon a wide variety of groups, from enemy aliens and military prisoners during the two World Wars, to refugees and immigrants as multicultural Britain evolved, while also impacting upon those who threatened imperial rule. The adherence to the rules of war depended on the situation at hand. In Britain itself, the central government decided who to intern, with or without parliament, while democratic institutions played even less of a role in the decolonisation process. The documents available via British Online Archives allow an important insight into such developments. 

[1] Jonathan Hyslop, “The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa and the Philippines, 1896–1907”, Southern African Historical Journal 63 (2011), pp. 251–76. 

[2] Jürgen Zimmerer, From Windhoek to Auschwitz? Reflections on the Relationship between Colonialism and National Socialism (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2024); Roger Daniels, Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Judith M. Gansberg, Stalag USA: The Remarkable Story of German POWs in America (New York: Crowell, 1977).

[3] Aidan Forth, Barbed-wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876–1903 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017).

[4] B. E. Mongalo and Kobus du Pisani, “Victims of a White Man’s War: Blacks in Concentration Camps during the South African War (1899–1902)”, Historia 44 (1999), p. 149.

[5] Stefan Manz and Panikos Panayi, Enemies in the Empire: Civilian Internment in the British Empire during the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 29.

[6] Alexander B. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press 2008).

[7] Manz and Panayi, Enemies in the Empire. See also Mahon Murphy, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

[8] Panikos Panayi, Prisoners of Britain: German Civilian and Combatant Internees during the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 45, using TNA/WO394/20, Statistical Information Regarding the Armies at Home and Abroad, 1914–1920.

[9] William Murphy, Political Imprisonment and the Irish, 1912–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[10] Ujjwal Kumar Singh “Political Prisoners in India, 1920–1977”, unpublished SOAS PhD thesis, 1996.

[11] Heinz A. Richter, History of the Island of Cyprus 1878–1949 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag in Kommission, 2021), pp. 276–82.

[12] As an introduction, see the relevant contributions to David Cesarani and Tony Kushner, eds, The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth Century Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1993); and Richard Dove, ed., ‘Totally un-English?’ Britain’s Internment of ‘Enemy Aliens’ in Two World Wars (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005).

[13] Alan Malpass, British Character and the Treatment of German Prisoners of War, 1939–48 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich, eds, Prisoners of War and their Captors in World War II: The British Empire and its Italian Prisoners of War, 1940–1947 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Renate Held, Kriegsgefangenschaft in Groβbritannien: Deutschen Soldaten des Zweiten Weltkrieges in britischem Gewahrsam (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008).

[14] Charlie Standley, “‘Tommy Atkins' Wrath: British Military Wrongdoing in Palestine, Malaya, Cyprus & Aden 1945–67”, Unpublished University of Reading PhD thesis, 2013; Council of Historic Memory of the EOKA Struggle, 1955–1959, The Concentration Camps (Nicosia: Press and Information Office, 2012); Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement and Counterinsurgencies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Caroline Elkins, Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Jonathan Cape, 2025).

[15] Martin J. McCleery, Operation Demetrius and its Aftermath: A New History of the Use of Internment Without Trial in Northern Ireland 1971–75 (Manchester University Press, 2015).

[16] Jordanna Bailkin, Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

[17] Haroon Siddique, “Prisoners Held over Alleged Palestine Action Offences Face Crackdown since Group Ban”, Guardian, 27 September 2025.

[18] See contributions to Cesarani and Kushner, Internment of Aliens.

[19] Manz and Panayi, Enemies in the Empire.

[20] Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

[21] See the work of Artemis Photiadou, including “Un-British No More: Torture and Interrogation by Britain in Germany, 1945–54”, Journal of Contemporary History 57 (2022), pp. 1029–1050.