Editing Concentration camp (section)

===Definition===
[[File:Weyler reconcentrados.png|thumb|left|Cuban victims of [[Reconcentration policy|Spanish reconcentration policies]], 1896]]
The term ''concentration camp'' originates from the Spanish–Cuban [[Ten Years' War]] when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in camps in order to more easily combat guerrilla forces. Over the following decades the British during the [[Second Boer War]] and the Americans during the [[Philippine–American War]] also used concentration camps.

The term "concentration camp" and "internment camp" are used to refer to a variety of systems that greatly differ in their severity, mortality rate, and architecture; their defining characteristic is that inmates are held outside the [[rule of law]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Stone |first=Dan |author-link=Dan Stone (historian) |title=Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction |date=2015 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-879070-9 |pages=122–123|quote=Concentration camps throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are by no means all the same, with respect either to the degree of violence that characterizes them or the extent to which their inmates are abandoned by the authorities... The crucial characteristic of a concentration camp is not whether it has barbed wire, fences, or watchtowers; it is, rather, the gathering of civilians, defined by a regime as de facto ‘enemies’, in order to hold them against their will without charge in a place where the rule of law has been suspended.}}</ref> <!-- He also refers to "internment camps" on page 123. --> [[Extermination camp]]s or death camps, whose primary purpose is killing, are also imprecisely referred to as "concentration camps".<ref>{{cite web |title=Nazi Camps |url=https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-camps?series=10 |publisher=[[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]] |access-date=3 October 2020}}</ref>

The ''[[American Heritage Dictionary]]'' defines the term ''concentration camp'' as: "A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable."<ref>{{Cite dictionary |title=Concentration camp |url=http://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=concentration+camp&submit.x=-664&submit.y=-210 |access-date=22 July 2014 |dictionary=American Heritage Dictionary}}</ref>

Although the first example of civilian internment may date as far back as the 1830s,<ref>{{Cite book |last=James L. Dickerson |title=Inside America's Concentration Camps: Two Centuries of Internment and Torture |publisher=Chicago Review Press |year=2010 |isbn=978-1-55652-806-4 |page=29}}</ref> the English term ''concentration camp'' was first used in order to refer to the [[Reconcentration policy|reconcentration camps]] (Spanish:''reconcentrados'')  which were set up by the [[Spain under the Restoration|Spanish military]] in [[Cuba]] during the [[Ten Years' War]] (1868–1878).<ref name="Columbia">{{Cite encyclopedia |encyclopedia=The Columbia Encyclopedia |title=Concentration Camp |date=2008 |publisher=Columbia University Press |edition=Sixth}}</ref><ref name="Smithsonian 2017">{{Cite news |date=2 November 2017 |title=Concentration Camps Existed Long Before Auschwitz |work=[[Smithsonian (magazine)|Smithsonian]] |url=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/concentration-camps-existed-long-before-Auschwitz-180967049/}}</ref> The label was applied yet again to camps set up by the United States during the [[Philippine–American War]] (1899–1902).<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Storey |first1=Moorfield |url=https://archive.org/stream/secretaryrootsr00codmgoog#page/n8/mode/2up |title=Secretary Root's record. "Marked severities" in Philippine warfare. An analysis of the law and facts bearing on the action and utterances of President Roosevelt and Secretary Root |last2=Codman |first2=Julian |publisher=George H. Ellis Company |year=1902 |location=Boston |pages=89–95 |author-link=Moorfield Storey |author-link2=Julian Codman}}</ref> And expanded usage of the ''concentration camp'' label continued, when the [[Second Boer War concentration camps|British set up camps]] during the [[Second Boer War]] (1899–1902) in South Africa for interning [[Boer]]s during the same time period.<ref name="Columbia" /><ref>{{Cite web |title=Documents re camps in Boer War |url=http://www-sul.stanford.edu/africa/boers.html |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070609212833/http://www-sul.stanford.edu/africa/boers.html |archive-date=9 June 2007 |publisher=sul.stanford.edu}}</ref> The [[German Empire]] also established concentration camps during the [[Herero and Nama genocide]] (1904–1907); the death rate of these camps was 45 per cent, twice that of the British camps.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Stone |first1=Dan|author-link=Dan Stone (historian) |title=Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction |date=2017 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-103502-9 |language=en|pages=19–20}}</ref>