A Question of Comparison—British Caribbean Slavery and the Holocaust in Germany and Occupied Europe

This chapter addresses two manifestly racist regimes headed by white, male colonisers, each using forced labour and entailing massive loss of life. Located in different climatic zones, one continental and the other maritime, each event occupies a separate period of time, Caribbean slavery the period 1650–1838, and forced labour and the Holocaust the period 1941–45. Following Katz, this book adopts a two-case study brought together in Chap. 9 as a synthesis. Important to this synthesis is the identification of race and religion as the source of victimhood; colonialism and occupation as the contexts; and slavery and forced labour as the key elements in the mode of production.