Hundreds of thousands of civilians were interned during the Second World War as “enemy aliens” for no reason other than their nationality or birthplace. It is 80 years since the end of that conflict, and, while there has been excellent work accomplished in recent decades, we are still compiling the true scale and impacts of the global incarceration of non-combatants. British Internment and the Internment of Britons, edited by Gilly Carr and Rachel Pistol, makes a solid contribution toward documenting and understanding that phenomenon.

Carr and Pistol focus on three areas: British internment of Germans and Italians in Britain, German and Italian internment of Britons in Europe, and British internment of Germans and Italians abroad, as reflected in the book's three-part structure. The editors bring relevant academic credentials to the task, Carr as an archaeologist with specialist expertise in conflict, occupation, and internment sites, most recently working on the Channel Islands, Pistol as an historian of immigration and internment, previously publishing a comparative study on UK and US internment camps (Internment during the Second World War, 2019). This interdisciplinarity is evident in each chapter, which evaluate the camps as structures, as spaces of human experience, as (lost) heritage sites, and as part of individual, family, and community memories.

Aside from the above foci, Carr and Pistol have three main aims. The first of these is to make visible less well-represented places of incarceration, or groups of people who were incarcerated. As Pistol notes in her chapter, most studies of internment focus on the permanent camps, whereas there were also transit, refugee, and temporary camps. Part one includes sites across Britain, from the earliest camps in Seaton to Sefton on the Isle of Man. Part two introduces the reader to Royallieu and Vittel in France and Tost (Toszek) in Upper Silesia, along with Italian internment of Anglo-Maltesi, persons of British citizenship who had migrated from Malta to Libya. Part three moves to British internment camps abroad, including British Mandate Palestine, British India, Canada, and Australia. This eclectic assemblage of case studies collectively emphasizes the global scale of British-related internment.

The second aim is to consider the fate and memory of these camps. Rather than ending the story with the end of the war, each chapter considers the aftermath, a common path being immediate descent into obscurity and a later rediscovery and recovery, often led by community groups or descendants of the internees. Carr and Pistol note this common postwar journey as the “overriding theme” uniting most of the chapters (5), and it is indeed an innovative and interesting feature of the collection.

The third aim is to take a comparative approach to understanding the camps. Doing so helps to combat “exceptionalism” (1) and instead look for commonalities and differences between the camps, and in the experiences of those within the camps. In particular, the comparison of British camps interning Germans and Italians with German and Italian camps interning Britons is claimed as unique. Aside from the remembering/forgetting mentioned above, common discernible themes include food, facilities and accommodation, chaos and unpreparedness, health and illness, friendships, and the establishment of activities and routines. Differences are also found in any of the above, such as the “Golden Cage” of the Vittel camp (149), where internees were housed in a hotel complex, compared to tents during the monsoon in the early Ahmednagar camp in India.

I am, however, wary of comparative claims in edited texts as the chapters are not in themselves comparative: we have examples laid out side by side, and it is the reader who undertakes the comparative work, even if facilitated, in this case, by a consistent chapter structure. It is one thing to document differences, another to analyze and attempt to explain them. The comparative approach also drew my attention to a large, if necessary, omission: where are the Japanese internees of the British, and the British internees of the Japanese? It is essential for any text to draw lines to contain focus, but Carr and Pistol do not note this elision in their introduction. There is thus much further scope for comparative work on internment camps in the Second World War.

There is, I think, another important outcome for British Internment. Civilian internment may be thought of as local and static, of having a relative level of immobility. What this collection reveals through its focus on smaller, lesser known, and often short-lived camps dispersed across the world is a complex and changing network with high levels of (forced) mobility. This is acknowledged but not emphasized by Carr and Pistol. Whether moving from a temporary camp to a transit camp to a permanent camp in England, or travelling across occupied lands in Europe, or being taken across the seas to Australia or Canada, this is a story of mass and multiple movements of people that requires greater recognition alongside others, like refugees, forced laborers, displaced persons, and expellees. This movement was often undertaken at significant risk to internees, as the chapter on the Arandora Star tragedy, sunk by a German U-boat, demonstrates. The Second World War caused massive population dislocation, but rarely are civilian internees adequately recognized in that story. British Internment realizes such recognition.

There are some factors that distract or detract from the content. There are several unfortunate typographical errors and some images are too small to properly view. Part three is titled “Camps in the British Dominions” (187). Considering that India was not technically a (short-lived) dominion until 1947 and Palestine was a mandate, it reads somewhat awkwardly and misses an opportunity for further interrogation of British use of these territories for such purposes.

Overall, Carr and Pistol make a valuable contribution to studies of civilian internment in the Second World War for both scholars and tertiary students, illuminating lesser recognized camps and highlighting forced mobilities within the internment system. Rather than local or national relevance alone, they rightly place the camps into a larger transnational narrative of civilian incarceration during war.