A new book by Emeritus Fellow Colin Clarke, a former Senior Research Fellow in Geography at Jesus, 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.
Racist Regimes, Forced Labour and Death: British Slavery in the Caribbean and the Holocaust in Germany and Occupied Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) compares the systems of exploitative race relations associated with the regimes, and identifies the four principal common denominators of each.
Colin highlights that although each racist system was introduced by expansionist European powers, through racist enslavement, transportation, dehumanisation and the destruction of human life, there were differences. For example, the construction and operation of sugar plantations by African and Creole slave labour for the export of tropical products in the period 1650-1838 was different from the mass murder of Jewish and Gypsy civilians with the intention of creating a forced-labour regime and colonial-style ethnic cleansing during the Second World War.
Professor Colin Clarke, Emeritus Fellow at Jesus College
However, although differentiated in time and place, the four main common denominators – racism, colonialism/occupation, slavery/forced labour, and death – make feasible the detailed comparison of British Caribbean slavery and the Holocaust. The juxtaposition of these two companion studies reveals comparisons and contrasts previously unexplored in the field of race relations under colonialism and the Holocaust.
Racist Regimes, Forced Labour and Death: British Slavery in the Caribbean and the Holocaust in Germany and Occupied Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
The book 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. Colin says, “My first major book Kingston Jamaica: Urban Development and Social Change, 1692-1962, based on my doctorate while a graduate at Jesus, was published by the University of California Press in 1975. That book traced the evolution of Kingston’s society from slavery to emancipation, and ultimately to the eve of Jamaica’s independence in 1962. In 2010-I1 I was invited to become a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, where I carried out my own research on the Holocaust. The ensuing book, based on my two-case study of British Caribbean slavery and the Holocaust, followed by a synthesised conclusion, has been published in Göttingen’s Global Diversities series.”
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