The Boer War

The Boer War was a costly colonial conflict between the British Empire and the two independent Boer republics in South Africa. Pitting the superior armed might of British imperialism against two of the world’s tiniest rural states, it nevertheless took almost three years for the Boer forces to be defeated. The war saw the first use by the British of civilian concentration camps and the employment of a ‘scorched earth’ policy against a European enemy, while the Boer amateur armies organised as commandos to try to hold out against defeat. Britain’s eventual victory laid the foundations of modern South Africa. Bill Nasson, Professor of History at the University of Stellenbosch, has fully revised and updated his earlier authoritative history of the conflict, taking account of the most recent scholarship and making use of Afrikaans sources as well as those in English. He places the Anglo-Boer War struggle of 1899–1902 in its historical context with other ‘small wars’, such as the more recent ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, making this an essential book not only for anyone interested in the Boer War, but also in imperial history more generally, and in Britain’s overseas colonial campaigns.