Evaluating the Legacy of the Boer Wars in Edwardian Reforms
My project, entitled Evaluating The Legacy of the Boer Wars in Edwardian Reforms aimed to connect the Second Boer War (1899-1902) and the failures associated with it with social and military reform efforts in the United Kingdom in the first decade of the 20th century. The Second Boer War was a war between the British and the Boer Republics of South Africa (populated and run by ethnic Afrikaners descended from the original Dutch settlers of the colony). It was an utter disaster for the British. It cost 40X the original estimate and required 10X as many soldiers as estimated. It also humiliated the British by piercing their aura of invincibility and, when combined with an increasingly powerful Germany, made for an increasingly paranoid British government and public. Over the course of my research, I learned about how the failures of the Boer War led to investigatory and data-gathering efforts that led to mass social reform and a complete reformulation of the British military. I also learned a lot about research and how to cope with doing archival research in this strange pandemic era. Being unable to travel to the United Kingdom, I was heavily reliant on online archives and the documents contained therein. Many documents of the period were originally microfiched and I am deeply grateful to those archivists who then digitized them. This project was for my senior thesis in the history department, to be completed this December. It also helped reinforce the idea, to me, that when we silo research into categories or departments, we lose sight of the bigger picture. By zooming out and looking at both the military and society at large, as well as at both government and private efforts, I was able to get a much more complete picture of the aftermath of the Boer War and the Edwardian Era in the UK. In the immediate, I have learned a great deal of extremely interesting information that will allow me to complete my thesis. On a broader scale, the skills I learned in this research and the lessons I take from my findings will be invaluable to me both in doing further research and as a method of thinking and writing.
Comments
It sounds like this project…
It sounds like this project is making an important contribution to British historiography in the early 20th century, and you do a great job of explain so! How do you see these developments influencing the lead up to WWI?
You wrote that the failures…
You wrote that the failures of the war efforts pierced the "aura of invincibility" that the British of itself. Did other nations actually also perceive this weakness to be significant, such as that of Germany?
In response
1) The developments influence the lead up by significantly increasing British military capability and by enabling them to fight such a sustained war. They also encouraged the British to seek military alliances rather than maintain the previous policy of "splendid isolation," especially to seek an understanding with Russia, the major power the British were most likely to fight a land-based war with (over Afghanistan, Persia, or India).
2) Other nations did not perceive of major British weakness as their weakness in the Boer War was almost entirely on the land side of things; the French, Russians and Germans broadly recognized that none of them could yet hope to match Britain on the seas (one of the major reasons neither the Russians nor Germans intervened in the Second Boer War, although both toyed with the idea). However, particularly in Germany, where public opinion was heavily anti-British and pro-Boer and the press was mostly controlled by the Kaiser and his chancellor, the war and its associated atrocities and problems helped garner public support for a major naval building program to hope to match Britain on the seas.