The Boer War (1899–1902)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Micajah Phillips
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Gold Deposits ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Boer War ◽  
South African War ◽  
Peace Settlement ◽  
The Great War

The British Empire waged two wars in southern Africa at the close of the nineteenth century. In the First Boer War (or Transvaal War) of 1880–81, Boer soldiers repelled Britain’s attempt to annex the diamond-rich Transvaal. The tense peace that followed was broken by the outbreak of the Second Boer War (or South African War, or Anglo-Boer War) of 1899–1902, the largest and most significant war the British Empire waged between the 1857 Indian Rebellion and the Great War of 1914–18. Fighting began when Britain sought to declare sovereignty over the Transvaal and Orange Free State, where huge gold deposits had recently been discovered. This provoked anti-British sentiment in southern Africa and among Britain’s colonial rivals, inspiring volunteer soldiers from the Netherlands and Germany to fight alongside the ethnically Dutch and German Boers. In the end, Britain lost millions of pounds and thousands of lives before reaching a peace settlement that would recognize British control over the Boer republics while offering a path to self-government (laying the foundations for both the Union of South Africa in 1910 and that dominion’s white separatist rule). In England, the war also exacerbated concerns over national degeneration when more than one-half of recruits failed military fitness exams (owing to the deprived living conditions of the urban poor), raising fresh questions about Britain’s imperial ambitions at the turn of the century. Though initially a popular war among Britons, the war’s grim aftermath had a deeper impact on modernism. ‘Since that period,’ Ford Madox Ford (né Hueffer) reflected, ‘the whole tone of England appears to me to have entirely changed’ (171).

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.

Home and Away. The Enlistment of Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and South African Men in Dominion Expeditionary Forces in the United Kingdom during the Great War

Itinerario ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-58
Author(s):  
John Connor
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
South African ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Australian Government ◽  
South Africans ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Canadian Citizenship ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Great War

On the outbreak of war, men from the Dominions were scattered across the British Empire. As each Dominion began recruiting their expeditionary forces at home, the issue arose whether these expatriates, especially those resident in the United Kingdom, should join the British Army or be able to enlist in their Dominion's force. Canada and New Zealand allowed recruiting for the CEF and NZEF in the UK. Many Anglophone White South Africans joined a “colonial” battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. The Australian Government refused to allow Australians in the UK to join the AIF, despite the repeated requests of the Australian expatriate community. This paper examines the questions of British and sub-Imperial Dominion identities as well as the practical policy considerations raised by this issue. It argues that there is some evidence of nascent Dominion nationalism—the Canadian High Commission in London issued what became known as “a Certificate of Canadian Citizenship” to expatriates— but that Dominion Governments generally based their decisions on this issue based on cost and domestic political considerations.

‘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.

scholarly journals Memory and Forgetting in the Nascent New Zealand Histories of James Cowan, Edith Statham and Horatio Gordon Robley

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lydia Whiting
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
South African ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
South African War ◽  
Queen Victoria ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Great War

<p><b>This thesis examines the nascent, early twentieth-century New Zealand histories created by James Cowan (1870-1943), Edith Statham (1853-1951), and Horatio Gordon Robley (1840-1930). It asks how their histories of the colonial past were shaped by their own experiences and by the contexts of the period c.1863-1940. In the early twentieth-century Cowan was a journalist, best known for his publication The New Zealand Wars (1922-23). Statham was an active volunteer in the Victoria League and then a government employee, dedicated to the work of refurbishing old soldier graves. Robley was a veteran of the New Zealand Wars residing in London, known for his ethnographic collecting, publications and artwork. This thesis considers how their work converged in efforts to preserve and narrate New Zealand’s colonial history.</b></p> <p>The discussion charts the lives and careers of these three history-makers through their publications, correspondence, manuscripts, reports and newspaper reports. It begins by situating each of the history-makers within the colonial era, considering their proximity to the events they would come to memorialise. The discussion then traces the three history-makers as they stepped into the new century, their work sitting within the tensions of belonging in New Zealand at this time. What they conveyed was both a sense of a belonging to a particular geographical and cultural locale, along with a strong allegiance to empire in wake of the Anglo-South African War and the death of Queen Victoria. The discussion then considers the era when all three focused in on the conflicts of the colonial period, beginning with Statham’s soldier grave work from 1910 and ending with Cowan’s publication of The New Zealand Wars in 1923. Funding this converging work was the New Zealand government. Preserving and narrating the history had gained public and political support, partly due to the sense of urgency that the generation who had fought in the wars was fast disappearing. The degree to which this historical work was considered valuable was underscored by both government funding and public interest at the same time as the country was facing a costly and confronting world war. The discussion then traverses their attempts to continue their historical work after 1923 and in the lead up to the 1940 centenary celebrations, a period when new forms of cultural belonging and modern scholarship moved away from those that had emboldened the work of Cowan, Statham and Robley decades earlier.</p> <p>The nascent histories of Cowan, Statham and Robley represent a powerful and perplexing moment in the formation of New Zealand. They each narrated histories and public memories of and for ‘New Zealand’ in a particular context, one marked by both an intense attention to the local and a powerful imperial loyalty. Statham, having pursued a sense of progressive female citizenship in Dunedin, took up the commemoration of men who had died for empire as an extension of her public work. In doing so, Statham embodied the dichotomy of belonging in New Zealand. Cowan’s candidacy for writing an official New Zealand War history was due to his proximity to those informants who were still alive at the end of the Great War. Cowan hoped to cultivate a habit of remembering actors and events of New Zealand’s colonial past, but by rendering past conflict as resolved in the present, he only enabled the lapse into forgetting thereafter. Despite his London locale, Robley was intimately tied to New Zealand activities and aspirations over a span of 30 years. Robley was both an actor in the colonial past and a creator of its historical renderings, demonstrating that these nascent New Zealand histories were not just produced in New Zealand.</p>

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document