During the First World War, the British government established one of the largest internment camps in the world at Knockaloe, near Peel. At its peak, Knockaloe held over twenty-three thousand civilian internees — men of German, Austrian, and other enemy-nation origin, held behind barbed wire on the western slopes of the island. The camp was larger than any town on Mann. The island that had governed itself for a thousand years, whose parliament had been silenced and whose economy had been destroyed, was now being used as a convenient place to put people Britain did not want on the mainland. Knockaloe was one of the external definitions that accumulated over the centuries — each one seeing the island as something to be used rather than something to be known.