The Union of South Africa was created in 1910 as a dominion state of the British Empire out of the colonies of the Transvaal, the Cape, Natal and the Orange River. The new government faced the task of trying to build a nation out of a white population racked with tension and conflict. Less than ten years earlier, sections of its population had been involved in the long and bloody Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). During the war, over 20 000 Afrikaner women and children alone died of disease and malnutrition in British concentration camps. Tens of thousands of others, including over 100 000 black Africans, were incarcerated in concentration and refugee camps. The defeat of the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in 1902 eventually led to the realisation of the British imperial vision of a federated Union of South Africa in 1910. But the bitter legacy of the war was harder to erase. Discussions of the ‘racial question’ at the time of Union referred to contestations and friction between Afrikaners and English speakers. Dan O'Meara has argued that greater attention should be paid to the origins of the modern South African state in the contestations between the British and Afrikaner in the Anglo-Boer War.