Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Note on references
- Introduction
- 1 South Africa and South Africans: Nationality, Belonging, Citizenship
- 2 Imperialism, Settler Identities, and Colonial Capitalism: The Hundred-Year Origins of the 1899 South African War
- 3 Class, Culture, and Consciousness in South Africa, 1880–1899
- 4 War and Union, 1899–1910
- 5 South Africa: The Union Years, 1910–1948 – Political and Economic Foundations
- 6 South African Society and Culture, 1910–1948
- 7 The Apartheid Project, 1948–1970
- 8 Popular Responses to Apartheid: 1948–c. 1975
- 9 Resistance and Reform, 1973–1994
- 10 The Evolution of the South African Population in the Twentieth Century
- 11 The Economy and Poverty in the Twentieth Century
- 12 Modernity, Culture, and Nation
- 13 Environment, Heritage, Resistance, and Health: Newer Historiographical Directions
- Statistical Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
4 - War and Union, 1899–1910
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Note on references
- Introduction
- 1 South Africa and South Africans: Nationality, Belonging, Citizenship
- 2 Imperialism, Settler Identities, and Colonial Capitalism: The Hundred-Year Origins of the 1899 South African War
- 3 Class, Culture, and Consciousness in South Africa, 1880–1899
- 4 War and Union, 1899–1910
- 5 South Africa: The Union Years, 1910–1948 – Political and Economic Foundations
- 6 South African Society and Culture, 1910–1948
- 7 The Apartheid Project, 1948–1970
- 8 Popular Responses to Apartheid: 1948–c. 1975
- 9 Resistance and Reform, 1973–1994
- 10 The Evolution of the South African Population in the Twentieth Century
- 11 The Economy and Poverty in the Twentieth Century
- 12 Modernity, Culture, and Nation
- 13 Environment, Heritage, Resistance, and Health: Newer Historiographical Directions
- Statistical Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
The conflict that broke out on 10 October 1899, with the expiry of President Kruger's ultimatum to the British government, was South Africa's ‘Great War’, as important to the shaping of modern South Africa as was the American Civil War in the history of the United States. South African union, on the imperial agenda since the failure of confederation in the 1870s, was born in its ashes, as whites on both sides joined hands to shore up white supremacy against the background of rumours of revolt by restive Africans. If, at one level, it was a war about colonial self-determination – however limited – at another, it was also a war for the survival of a settler society, and about the credibility and international reputation of the British Empire, raising major moral issues of global importance. As the ‘biggest ever “small war” of late Victorian “new Imperialism”, the 1899–1902 conflagration has a recognised significance in world history’, not least because of the way it touched the fin de siècle European and American imagination.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of South Africa , pp. 157 - 210Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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