The Impact of the South African War

The Impact of the South African War Edited by David Omissi and Andrew S. Thompson Selection, editorial matter and Introduction © David Omissi and Andrew S. Thompson 2002 Chapter 5 © Andrew S. Thompson 2002 Chapter 11 © David Omissi 2002 Remaining chapters © Palgrave Publishers Ltd 2002 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002 978-0333-77699-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 978-1-349-41729-2 ISBN 978-0-230-59829-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230598294 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Impact of the South African War / edited by David Omissi and Andrew S. Thompson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. South African War, 1899–1902—Influence. 2. South African War, 1899–1902—Social aspects. I. Omissi, David E., 1960– II. Thompson, Andrew S. (Andrew Stuart), 1968–. DT1918.I54 I47 2001 968.04′81—dc21 2001036878 10987654321 11 100908070605040302 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire Contents

List of Maps, Tables and Figures vii

Preface viii

List of Abbreviations x

Notes on the Contributors xi

Introduction: Investigating the Impact of the War 1 David Omissi and Andrew Thompson

Part I The South African Impact

1 The War in Twentieth-Century Afrikaner Consciousness 23 Albert Grundlingh

2 Black Communities in and the Cape 38 Bill Nasson

3 Capitalism and the War 56 Iain R. Smith

4 Imagining the New in the Era of Reconstruction 76 Saul Dubow

Part II The British Impact 5 Publicity, Philanthropy and Commemoration: British Society and the War 99 Andrew Thompson

6 The Making of a War Correspondent: Lionel James of The Times 124 Jacqueline Beaumont

7 The British Peace Movement and the War 138 Paul Laity

8 Preaching Imperialism: Wesleyan Methodism and the War 157 Greg Cuthbertson

v vi Contents

9 British Radicalism, the South African Crisis, and the Origins of the Theory of Financial Imperialism 173 Peter J. Cain 10 ‘National Efficiency’ and the ‘Lessons’ of the War 194 Geoffrey Searle

Part III The Imperial and International Impact 11 : Some Perceptions of Race and Empire 215 David Omissi 12 Canada 233 Phillip Buckner 13 Building Nations: and New Zealand 251 Luke Trainor 14 ‘The World’s no Bigger than a Kraal’: the South African War and International Opinion in the First Age of ‘Globalization’ 268 Donal Lowry Afterword: the Imprint of the War 289 John Darwin

Index 303 List of Maps, Tables and Figures

Maps

1. Southern Africa on the Eve of the War xiv 2. Southern Africa after the War xv 3. The , 1910 xvi

Tables

5.1 Sample of the amounts received by the leading Borough and County Funds 108 5.2 Sample of the amounts received by the leading Central Relief Funds 108 5.3 Total amounts subscribed to the War Relief Funds 108

Figures

2.1 The ‘Black Watch’: African Militiamen, Somerset East, Cape , 1901 49 5.1 Bob’s Great War Game 102 5.2 A Patriotic Song by Evan W. Dixon – ‘The Tommies and Tars of the ’ 105 5.3 Example of a Collecting Card from the Derbyshire Transvaal War Fund 110–111 5.4 South African War Memorials at Birmingham, York and Newcastle 115–117 14.1 Joseph Chamberlain depicted as a hung game bird 273

vii Preface

All the component chapters of this book were specially commissioned. It brings together scholars from South Africa, Britain, Canada and New Zealand, whose interests span a wide range of history, both geograph- ically (South African, British, imperial, international) and thematically (political, economic, cultural and military). Their particular concerns are framed and contextualized in the Introduction, which also explains the volume’s rationale, and their cumulative significance is reflected upon in John Darwin’s Afterword. In conceptualizing ‘impact’, we have distinguished between the short, the medium and the longer term. A number of the essays focus on the short-term impact of the war, looking at the social dislocation it caused, and at varying reactions during and immediately after the conflict. Other essays cover the medium term, such as that on the debate about ‘national efficiency’ in Britain, and that on the rise of white ‘South Africanism’ in the period of Reconstruction. A few touch on the longer term, and consider the war’s enduring legacies: for Afrikaner conscious- ness, for the international community’s relations with successive Afrikaner , and for the development of anti-imperialist doctrines – respects in which the war arguably had a significant ‘afterlife’. We have chosen to refer to the conflict as the ‘South African War’. For many British contemporaries it was the ‘Transvaal War’, and runs of official British documents are listed under this heading in the UK archives, whereas in some Afrikaner versions of South African history it has been remembered as the ‘War of Independence’, or the ‘Second War of Freedom’ (the first being the conflict of 1881). Until recently, the most common scholarly description was the ‘Boer War’ or ‘Anglo-Boer War’; but even this can mislead, for the conflict was never simply one between Briton and Boer. All the inhabitants of South Africa – White, Black, Coloured and Indian – were involved in or affected by the war; there were a variety of international volunteers fighting with the Boers; and, particularly by the end, some Boer ‘Scouts’ were working with the British. The ‘South African War’, then, seems both the most neutral and the most accurate description. As editors, we would like to acknowledge the hard work of our con- tributors, and to thank them for the cheerful goodwill with which they received our editorial suggestions. We are grateful to Tim Farmiloe for

viii Preface ix commissioning the project, and to Luciana O’Flaherty for seeing it through to publication. Thanks to Julie Anne Lambert, Librarian of the John Johnson Collection, for her help in arranging for the reproduction of the poster featured on the book’s jacket, to Birmingham Library Services for providing the photograph of Birmingham’s South African War memorial, and to the Derbyshire Record Office for permission to reproduce the Collecting Card from the Derbyshire Transvaal War Fund. Greg Cuthbertson, John Darwin, Saul Dubow, Paul Laity, John MacKenzie and Simon Smith made many helpful comments on drafts of the Introduction. Our partners, Clare and Sarah, have encouraged our work, and have patiently endured our regular – and seemingly interminable – telephone conversations. Many thanks to them. All royalties from this book are being donated to the National Monu- ments Commission of South Africa, which is responsible for maintain- ing South Africa’s official memorials to those who died as a result of the conflict.

DAVID OMISSI ANDREW THOMPSON List of Abbreviations

ABWMP Anglo-Boer War Memorials Project ANC African National Congress ANZAC Australian and New Zealand Army Corps BCINC British Committee of the Indian National Congress BEF British Expeditionary Force BRCS British Red Cross Society CA Cape Archives CID Committee of Imperial Defence CO Colonial Office and Records, Public Record Office, London FPC Friends’ Peace Committee IAL International Arbitration League IAPA International Arbitration and Peace Association ILP Independent Labour Party INC Indian National Congress IODE Independent Order of the Daughters of the Empire NAI National Archives of India, New Delhi NIA News International Archive NNR Native Newspaper Reports NSL National Service League NWMP North West Mounted Police NWPO North-Western Provinces and Oudh OFS Orange ORC Orange River Colony OTC Officers Training Corps PRO Public Records Office, Kew RCMP Royal Canadian Mounted Police SDF Social Democratic Federation SSFA Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association WMMS Weslyan Methodist Missionary Society WO War Office and Records, Public Records Office WPA Workmen’s Peace Association

x Notes on the Contributors

Jacqueline Beaumont returned to full-time historical research after retiring from the Civil Service, and has written widely on the British press and the reporting of colonial wars. She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and is writing a comparat- ive study of the reporting of the three sieges of Kimberley, Ladysmith and Mafeking.

Philip Buckner recently retired from the History Department at the University of New Brunswick and is now an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London. He has written many articles on various aspects of Canadian history, and is the author of The Transition to Responsible : British Policy in North America, 1815–1850 (1985) and editor of The Atlantic Region to Confed- eration: a History (1994).

Peter Cain is Research Professor at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author, with A. G. Hopkins, of British Imperialism, 1688–2000 (2001). He has also written numerous articles about J. A. Hobson. His book on Hobson, Governing the Imperial Engine: J. A. Hobson, New Liberalism and the Theory of Financial Imperialism, 1887–1940, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2002.

Greg Cuthbertson is Head of the Department of History at the Univer- sity of South Africa, . He is an international contributing editor of the Journal of American History and has recently edited (with Alan Jeeves) a special issue of the South African Historical Journal: ‘The South African War, 1899–1902, Centennial Perspectives’ (1999), and (with A. Grundlingh and M.-L. Suttie) Writing a Wider War: Rethinking the South African War, 1899–1902 (2001).

John Darwin is Beit Lecturer in the History of the British Common- wealth at Nuffield College, Oxford. His publications include Britain, Egypt and the Middle East (1981), Britain and Decolonisation: the Retreat from Empire in the Post-war World (1988), and The End of the British

xi xii Notes on the Contributors

Empire: the Historical Debate (1991). He has also contributed to the Oxford History of the British Empire.

Saul Dubow is Reader in History in the School of African and Asian Studies at the University of Sussex. His publications include Racial Segregation and the Origins of in South Africa (1989) and Scien- tific Racism in Modern South Africa (1995). Most recently he has written The African National Congress (2000) and produced an edited collection, Science and Society in Southern Africa (2000).

Albert Grundlingh is Professor of History at the University of Stellen- bosch. He has published historical monographs on war and society in the South African context and has written widely on South African historiographical themes, Afrikaner historical consciousness and the history of sport in South Africa.

Paul Laity was awarded a D.Phil in Modern History by Balliol College, Oxford. His monograph The British Peace Movement, 1870–1914 has just been published by Oxford University Press.

Donal Lowry is Senior Lecturer in History at Oxford Brookes University and Tutorial Fellow in Modern History at Greyfriars Hall, University of Oxford. He has published articles and essays on various aspects of Southern African, British Imperial and Irish history, and has edited and contributed to The South African War Reappraised (2000). He is currently working on a book on British relationships with the since 1918.

Bill Nasson is Professor of History at the University of . His publications include Abraham Esau’s War: a Black South African War in the Cape, 1899–1902 (1991), The South African War, 1899–1902 (1999) and Uyadela Wen’Osalapho: Black Participation in the Anglo-Boer War (1999). He is an editor of The Journal of African History.

David Omissi is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Hull. He is the author of The Sepoy and the Raj: the Indian Army, 1860–1940 (1994) and editor of Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–1918 (1999).

Geoffrey Searle is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of East Anglia. His books include The Quest for National Efficiency (1971), Notes on the Contributors xiii

Corruption in British Politics, 1895–1930 (1987) and Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (1998). He is currently writing the volume on the period 1886 to 1918 for the New Oxford History of England.

Iain Smith is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The Origins of the South African War (1996), and has contributed a chapter on Southern Africa, 1795–1910 (with Christopher Saunders) to the Oxford History of the British Empire. He has recently edited and contributed to The Siege of Mafeking, 2 Vols (2001).

Andrew Thompson is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Leeds. He has published several articles on the effects of empire on British society and politics, and is also the author of Imperial Britain: the Empire in British Politics, c.1880–1932 (2000). He is currently working on a study of the impact of imperialism on Britain from the Indian Mutiny to the present, to be published by Longman.

Luke Trainor was born in Australia and was Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Canterbury from 1970. He is the author of British Imperialism and Australian Nationalism: Manipulation, Conflict and Com- promise in the Late Nineteenth Century (1994). Although retired from teaching, he continues to research, with a particular emphasis on and print culture in New Zealand and Australia.

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