A Place in the Empire: Gibraltar Camp in Jamaica and the British Imperial Order, 1940–1947

Abstract

ABSTRACT In July 1940 the British Government erected a camp in Jamaica to house thousands of civilian evacuees from Gibraltar. Only about 1,500 Gibraltarians ended up there – mostly women, children, and elderly. The available space that remained served to intern a few hundred European Jewish refugees, as well as Enemy Aliens and Prisoners of War. About two hundred Jamaicans were employed in the camp, including the Camp Commandant. The little-known Gibraltar Camp created a rather odd encounter between people who occupied different positions within the British imperial global order, and outside of it. My main purpose in this article is to learn about the ways in which people engaged with imperial classifications as they were simultaneously placed and displaced by them. Drawing on official and non-official documents from several archives, and on newspapers, recordings of interviews, and self-published autobiographies, I argue that while the intention of the authorities in sending groups of people to Gibraltar Camp was to ‘put aside’ those who were deemed a disturbance, the constant negotiations about labels indicate that the physical placement of people in a camp did not work to wholly exclude them from the prevailing order of things.