Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-ph5wq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T09:24:09.045Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2009

Get access

Summary

The South African War was a costly and bloody struggle. From the beginning of military operations in October 1899 to the signing of peace in Pretoria on the last day of May 1902 it claimed the lives of 22,000 imperial soldiers and over 7000 republican fighters. Almost 28,000 Boer civilians, most of them children under the age of sixteen, perished in British concentration camps during the war's protracted guerrilla phase. The conflict cost the British taxpayer more than £200 million and laid waste to large areas of the conquered Boer states.

The war owed its origin to the discovery in 1886 of gold deposits on the Witwatersrand in the South African Republic, the independent Boer state beyond the Vaal river. The region of the new mining capital, Johannesburg, thereafter began rapidly to industrialise, attracting international capital and a cosmopolitan immigrant (uitlander) population of mining engineers, artisans and fortune-seekers from Europe, America and the rest of South Africa. Thousands of migrant black workers from the subcontinent were also drawn to the Rand. By the end of 1895 the heavily mechanised and expensive extraction of gold from deep levels had begun, and by 1898 the Transvaal accounted for more than a quarter of the world's total gold output, the largest single source of supply.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Introduction
  • Peter Warwick
  • Book: Black People and the South African War 1899–1902
  • Online publication: 21 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511523908.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Introduction
  • Peter Warwick
  • Book: Black People and the South African War 1899–1902
  • Online publication: 21 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511523908.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Peter Warwick
  • Book: Black People and the South African War 1899–1902
  • Online publication: 21 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511523908.004
Available formats
×