The Great Pacifist, 1894–1912

W. T. Stead ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 165-208
Author(s):  
Stewart J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
World Federation ◽  
Scientific Racism ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
South African War ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Peace Activism ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Hague

From the mid-1890s, W. T. Stead fervently took up the cause of world peace; the peace campaign, inspired by his Christian faith, became his most prominent public activity of his final years. His peace activism included a leading role in opposing the South African War of 1899–1902, a role that made him for a time arguably the most hated person in Britain. He also took a prominent role in promoting the international peace conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907. Through his peace commitments Stead become an increasingly international figure, who from about 1903 moved beyond his former belief in the divine mission of the ‘English-speaking race’—now to denounce ‘pseudo-scientific’ racism, to call for justice for victims of Western imperialism in Africa and India, and to promote ideas of world federation.

W. T. Stead

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Social Reformer ◽  
Child Prostitution ◽  
South African War ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
Participatory Journalism ◽  
Newspaper Editor ◽  
English Speaking

W. T. Stead (1849–1912), newspaper editor, author, social reformer, advocate for women’s rights, peace campaigner, spiritualist, was one of the best-known public figures in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. This a religious biography of Stead, giving particular attention to Stead’s conception of journalism, in an age of growing mass literacy, as a means to communicate religious truth and morality, and his view of the editor’s desk as a modern pulpit from which the editor could preach to a congregation of tens of thousands. The book explores how his Nonconformist Conscience and sense of divine calling infused his newspaper crusades, most famously his ‘Maiden Tribute’ campaign against child prostitution, and it considers his efforts, through forms of participatory journalism, to create a ‘union of all who love in the service of all who suffer’ and a ‘Civic Church’. The book considers his growing interest in spiritualism and the occult as he searched for the evidence of an afterlife that might draw people of an increasingly secular age back to faith. It discusses his imperialism and his belief in the English-speaking peoples of the British Empire and American Republic as God’s new chosen people for the spread of civilization, and it considers how his growing understanding of other faiths and cultures, but more especially his moral revulsion over the South African War of 1899–1902, brought him to question those beliefs. Finally, it assesses the influence of religious faith on his campaigns for world peace and the arbitration of international disputes.

THE KING'S AFRIKANERS? ENLISTMENT AND ETHNIC IDENTITY IN THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA'S DEFENCE FORCE DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, 1939–45

1999 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALBERT GRUNDLINGH
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Societal Issues ◽  
South African War ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Second World

In contrast to the situation in Commonwealth countries such as Canada and Australia, South Africa's participation in the Second World War has not been accorded a particularly significant place in the country's historiography. In part at least, this is the result of historiographical traditions which, although divergent in many ways, have a common denominator in that their various compelling imperatives have despatched the Second World War to the periphery of their respective scholarly discourses.Afrikaner historians have concentrated on wars on their ‘own’ soil – the South African War of 1899–1902 in particular – and beyond that through detailed analyses of white politics have been at pains to demonstrate the inexorable march of Afrikanerdom to power. The Second World War only featured insofar as it related to internal Afrikaner political developments. Neither was the war per se of much concern to English-speaking academic historians, either of the so-called liberal or radical persuasion. For more than two decades, the interests of English-speaking professional historians have been dominated by issues of race and class, social structure, consciousness and the social effects of capitalism. While the South African War did receive some attention in terms of capitalist imperialist expansion, the Second World War was left mostly to historians of the ‘drum-and-trumpet’ variety. In general, the First and Second World Wars did not appear a likely context in which to investigate wider societal issues in South Africa.

German Capital, The Netherlands Railway Company and the Political Economy of the Transvaal 1886–1900

1978 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.J. Van Helten
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Gold Mining ◽  
Mining Industry ◽  
The Political ◽  
The South ◽  
Railway Company ◽  
South African War ◽  
German Capital ◽  
The Hague ◽  
The Republic

This article tries to throw light on one aspect of the ‘business partition’ of Africa, namely Anglo–erman economic rivalry on the Rand between 1886 and 1900. It examines the activities of the German-owned Netherlands South African Railway Company (N.Z.A.S.M.), which possessed the monopoly of construction and management of all railways connecting the republic with a seaport. The article assesses this company's impact upon the relations of the South African Republic with both the maritime colonies of the Cape and Natal and with Great Britain. Whitehall regarded the N.Z.A.S.M. as the fountainhead of ever-increasing German commercial and political penetration in the Transvaal and also considered the railway company hostile to its interests in that it allegedly discriminated against British commerce. The gold-mining industry also viewed the company with hostility, since its high freightrates increased the price of imported machinery, foodstuffs, etc. The South African Republic, on the other hand, saw the N.Z.A.S.M. as a useful means of access to both the German and Dutch capital markets, while the company arranged for diplomatic lobbying in Berlin and The Hague in favour of the Republic.By 1898, German mining interests on the Rand had managed to persuade Berlin that their interests were not served by either the Kruger regime or the German-owned N.Z.A.S.M. and that an administration more favourably disposed towards their objectives, and possibly imposed by force by the British, should not be opposed. It is therefore argued that the South African War was prompted mainly by the desire to establish British commercial hegemony on the Rand, to safeguard the interests of international mining capital and to create a more pliable polity capable of articulating and responding to these particular economic imperatives.

scholarly journals Reading Practices and Literacy of Boer Combatants in the South African War of 1899–1902

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-307
Author(s):  
Fransjohan Pretorius
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
South African ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
The State ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
The South ◽  
Planning Strategy ◽  
The Bible ◽  
South African War ◽  
Reading Matter

In investigating the reading practices of Boer combatants during the South African War, diaries, letters, and reminiscences were consulted. The state of literacy reveals a picture of a small number of highly literate men, a larger group of adequately literate men, a still larger group of semi-literates, and the illiterate. Reading matter included the Bible, newspapers, and books. Issues raised are: Did literacy (or illiteracy) influence military decision-making or troop morale? Were certain works making some impact on the battlefield? Was the practical experience the Boers had gained before the war more successful in planning strategy and tactics than literacy?

Boer War

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
African Region ◽  
Boer War ◽  
War Memory ◽  
South African War ◽  
White Settler ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
And Control

The Boer War of 1899–1902, also termed the Anglo-Boer War or South African War, was waged by Britain to establish its imperial supremacy in South Africa and by Boers/Afrikaners to defend their independent republican order and control of the destiny of the white settler states they had secured in the interior. Large, long, controversial and costly, the Boer War was a colonial conflict which finally completed the British imperial conquest of the Southern African region. As is to be expected of a war that has a widely recognized significance not only in the history of European imperialism in Southern Africa but in world history more generally, literature on the 1899–1902 conflict is, simply, enormous. Scholarship is available not merely in English and in Afrikaans, but also in Dutch, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and even in Japanese. As it happens, more recent decades have seen the publication of sizeable bibliographies covering a century of writings on the Boer War in German and in Dutch. Although it could obviously not be claimed that every aspect of the 1899–1902 period—military, political, economic, social, or cultural—has been treated, evenly or otherwise, by so vast a body of literature, the sheer quantity of work available has to influence the scope and selectivity of any Boer War bibliography of this kind. While this bibliographic article includes some seminal early pieces, it is weighted toward more recently works and, in particular, includes scholarship which contains detailed bibliographies covering aspects of warfare (battles, sieges) that are not a specific focus of the approach taken here. Secondly, other classifiable areas of historiography which fall beyond the limits of this article, such as war memory and commemoration, and postwar economic reconstruction and political state-making, are treated—in some instances, quite substantially—in single-author general overviews and in multi-author edited treatments. In other respects, this article goes beyond more conventional historical terrain in including the war’s literary and cultural influences.

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