Introduction

Summary

The Introduction outlines the book’s scope as exploring the taxonomy of concentration-camp types that emerged, temporarily, in the three geographical areas of focus: Australia, the USA and Singapore, and in related conflicts around the Pacific Basin. It highlights key theoretical approaches: genealogy, archipelagic consciousness and border-thinking as the book’s intellectual framework investigating how the global conflict shaped and transformed settler-colonial forms of sovereignty as revealed in the wartime prisons and prison camps’ designs and materiality. The Introduction argues that although architectural histories have previously neglected the Pacific War architectures of confinement, the discipline offers a unique lens into wartime histories.