Chapter 8 links and compares two case studies. The sites of the Canadian and US internment or incarceration of people of Japanese origin were spatially initiated through their demarcation of a strip of land along the Pacific coast varying approximately inland as an exclusion area. The Canadian government moved “members of the Japanese race” in British Columbia, including Canadian citizens, into the mountainous terrain of the Kootenays region. Camps, named Assembly Centers and Relocation Centers, were designed as prison cities laid out in grid systems with repetitive rows of standard military barracks, using US Army Corps of Engineers standard plans. Using Manzanar and New Denver as case histories, the chapter examines how incarcerated civilian populations immediately set about altering the camp environments to make them more habitable.

Chapter 5 shifts to the island colony of Singapore, where Australia’s Eighth AMF Division defended the island alongside British and local forces and volunteers in the weeks before its capitulation, suffering greatly as Japanese captives. The chapter describes the dispersal of camps at the fall of Singapore, following the fate of Australian and other Allied soldiers across an emergent camp geography. Its main aim is envisioning the entirety of the island as converted to an encampment through the distribution of Allied camps, including the dispersal of work camps in requisitioned domestic and institutional facilities, exploring how wartime defense and capitulation provided structures for contemporary citizenship.

Accepting that white and black soldiers were physically different meant that army commanders could treat them differently too. White soldiers were housed in the newest barracks and healthiest locations precisely because it was thought that black soldiers preferred, and indeed would thrive in, places too sickly for whites. If economies in diet or clothing needed to be made, it was generally thought that West India Regiment soldiers enjoyed living off the land and could easily cope without army rations, or complete uniforms. But it was the perceived ability of black soldiers to labour in tropical conditions that caused the most significant problems. Some unscrupulous commanders were willing to use the men as forced labour. This was not uncontested, some army commanders warned against it, and the men of the 8th West India Regiment mutinied in Dominica in 1802 as a direct result of being used, as they saw it, as slaves. The blame for this mutiny was eventually laid at the feet of abusive commanders, but differential treatment was clearly shaped by an understanding that white and black bodies were not the same.