“Because we are white men”

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
British Empire ◽  
White Men ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Military Leader ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
South African War ◽  
White Settler ◽  
British Military

This chapter examines Irish nationalism in the context of the British Empire and its rapid expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century. It focuses on Erskine Childers who participated in the South African War as a volunteer member of an artillery company that augmented the regular British military forces. The son of an English father and an Irish mother, he entered the war as a British patriot but in its aftermath became a pro-Boer and, soon thereafter, an Irish nationalist. He had much in common with the white South African Jan Christian Smuts, who was also a participant in the war as a political and military leader of the Boer republics. Both men were deeply concerned with the place of the white settler colonies, or dominions, in the emerging British Empire–Commonwealth, but ultimately they went in markedly different directions.

“From the Cabins of Connemara to the Kraals of Kaffirland”

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Nelson
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Black African ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
South African War ◽  
British Foreign Policy

This chapter examines Irish nationalism in the context of the British Empire and its rapid expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century. It focuses on Michael Davitt, who participated in the South African War. Davitt became a bitter opponent of British foreign policy and a war correspondent for American and Irish newspapers. He had long been committed to an essentialist discourse of Anglo-Saxon versus Celt that required the demonization of the Saxon for his manifold sins. While Davitt became famous for his opposition to anti-Semitism and support for the aboriginal peoples of Australia and New Zealand, we must also recognize that in romanticizing the Boers as heroic victims of British imperialism he allowed himself to demonize their black African adversaries in ways that not only distorted historical reality but also reflected the intense racism of his time.

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.

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.

‘The red livery of shame’: the campaign against army recruitment in Ireland, 1899—1914

1994 ◽  
Vol 29 (114) ◽  
pp. 208-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terence Denman
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
British Government ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Boer War ◽  
Political Concern ◽  
South African War ◽  
The People ◽  
National Sentiment ◽  
Party Members ◽  
The Times

In November 1899 The Times published a letter from a correspondent in Enniskillen recalling the army’s recruiting parades when he was a boy:The recruiting party — members of the regiment stationed here — usually fell in about 2 o’clock. There were two rows of non-commissioned officers (sergeants) in front, with swords drawn and ribbons streaming from their caps, then came the band playing spirit-stirring airs, a few rows of corporals forming the rear. Their appearance was quite imposing and invariably attracted a large crowd of stalwart peasant lads, as well as town youths and others. And it was certainly calculated to inspire a military enthusiasm in the breasts of the people . . . and many a fine young fellow, becoming enamoured of the service, was induced to accompany the party to the barracks and finally take the shilling.Only weeks before the Boer War had broken out, and the question of seducing ‘stalwart peasant lads’ to ‘take the shilling’ was becoming one of acute political concern in Ireland. For the Boer War was ‘nearly as crucial an event for Irish nationalism as the death of Parnell’. The sight of England engaged in a major colonial war and, in the early months, being ‘worsted in the game’ stimulated national sentiment: ‘the feeling against the British government was brought out in a remarkable manner, owing to the difficulties of the South African War’. Yet there were thousands of Irishmen in Britain’s army in South Africa.

British Women Wanted

2016 ◽  
pp. 283-309
Author(s):  
Melissa Free
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Olive Schreiner ◽  
White Settler ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
The New Woman

This essay brings together three areas that until fairly recently had received scant attention from scholars of the British Empire: female emigration, ‘white settler colonies’, and emigration literature. In particular, it examines the generic innovations of Olive Schreiner, H. Rider Haggard, and Gertrude Page, the former a self-identified ‘English South African’ and the latter two authorial informants, British authors who spent time in southern Africa and wrote about the region as insiders. These writers, I argue, bolstered female, even feminist, subjectivity through generic innovation that is an effect of the translocal. Employing new fictional forms—the New Woman novel, the female colonial romance, and the empire romance—to solve markedly gendered problems, they not only imagine new spaces for settler women beyond the matrimonial and the maternal; they also anticipate generic developments generally associated with the metropole.

South Africa and the International Community

1966 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Dale
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Western World ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Boer War ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Ever since the discovery there of gold and diamonds in the last half of the nineteenth century, South Africa has engaged the rapt attention of the Western world. The saga of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, perhaps the last of the “gentlemen's wars,” and now the refurbished accounts of the gallant defense of Rorke's Drift in the AngloZulu War of 1879 have been fascinating material for both novelists and film scriptwriters. In addition, the history of South Africa is replete with titanic figures who rank with, or perhaps even above, those from the rest of the continent: the aggressive architect of empire, Cecil J. Rhodes; the redoubtable Zulu warrior, Chaka; the dour, stern-willed President of the South African Republic, “Oom” (Uncle) Paul Kruger; the world-renowned statesman and philosopher, Field Marshal Jan C. Smuts; the founding father of Indian independence, Mohandas K. Gandhi; the compassionate and courageous writer, Alan S. Paton; and the dignified, modest Zulu Nobel Laureate, Albert J. Luthuli. By any standard, South Africa and its leaders of all races have made far-reaching and impressive contributions to the continent, the British Empire, and the world at large.

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