What was the Boer War? Below I will give you a detailed introduction to the relevant content.
Africa is an ancient continent, in the vast land south of the Sahara Desert, there are many black communities and tribes living. However, since modern times, South Africa has gradually formed a white emerging nation, known as the Boers.
The emergence of the Boers can be traced back to the late 15th century, when it was the beginning of the great geographic discoveries, the active period of the great maritime exploration. Since then, along with the Dutch East India Company's colonization around Cape Town and the French Wars of Religion, many Dutch and French Huguenot Protestants moved to South Africa and gradually formed a farm economy, which gradually merged into a new ethnic group.
The word "Boer" means farmer, or "farm owner", and represents the social structure and occupational distribution of this new ethnic group. However, this was not to last long, and after the outbreak of the French Revolution, the Dutch mainland was occupied by France in 1795, and the British took the opportunity to send a fleet of ships to defeat the Dutch militia in the vicinity of Cape Town, and occupied the Dutch colony.
During Napoleon's reign, the British briefly returned this territory to the Dutch. But when Napoleon failed, he once again occupied the Cape Colony and began to restrict the Boer farm economy, and in 1834, the British enacted an ordinance to abolish slavery, which had an enormous impact on the Boers, whose main business was the slave farm economy. In order to escape the oppressive policies of the British, the Boers left the Cape Colony and migrated deep into the interior of South Africa, where they defeated the Zulus in 1840 and established the Natalia*** and State.
At this time, the British Empire was in the middle of the day, at the pinnacle of the Sunset Era, and formulated a colonial policy of connecting the British colonies in Africa north and south through the two directions of South Africa in the south and Egypt in the north. So trailing in the footsteps of the Boers, the British once again extinguished the Boer regime, forcing the Boers to migrate again, and in 1849 established the South African **** and the country.
The Boer's South African **** and State maintained a mutually recognized reciprocal relationship with Britain, but because of the oppression of the indigenous Zulu people in southern Africa, the Boer's South African **** and State faced a long period of severe armed conflict, the finances of a serious crisis. The limitations of the farm economy and the reality of good land being appropriated by the British made the Boers reluctantly accept the British demands after more than 20 years and annexed to the British colony.
Although the two sides reached an agreement to finally merge together, but the Boers and the British are whether the economic model, cultural customs and political formations are huge differences, so the centrifugal force of the Boers is still very strong. 1880 December, the Boer citizen groups and the British garrison clashed, the Boer militia then ambushed the British reinforcements, the first Boer War broke out.
The first Boer War broke out.
At the time, the British Empire had a global reach, and the Boers were a small population group that was just forming. But at the Battle of the Bronkhorst dry river, 77 of the 247 men in the British army were killed and 157 wounded, while the Boer militia had only 2 dead and 4 wounded, which boosted Boer morale for a while.
In January of the following year, the British sent further reinforcements to the Transvaal, totaling over a thousand men. However, at Lang Gap, on the border between Natal and the Transvaal, they were stopped by General Joubert on the Boer militia side. In this battle 93 British were killed, 133 wounded and 54 captured, and the leading British commander, General Colley, was killed. On the Boer militia side only one man was killed and five wounded.
As a last resort, the British and the Boers signed an armistice, which was later supplemented by the Pretoria Agreement. In this agreement it was stipulated that the Boer-controlled Transvaal had an autonomous status, but Britain controlled both the Transvaal's foreign relations and its wartime lend-lease rights and interests. After the First Boer War, although there was a largely proper ending, the British Empire had been reduced to a target of ridicule by the European powers, and was especially despised by Germany, which had risen to power with a strong army.
At that time, the Boers mainly controlled the Transvaal and Orange regions. Of these, diamonds had been discovered in the Orange River region before the First Boer War in 1867, and in 1884 the Transvaal discovered the Witwatersrand gold mine, then the largest in the world. The growth of mineral resources and tax profits contributed to the Boer economic surge, while also increasing friction with Britain. The British, coveting their wealth and resigned to their defeat, once again launched the Second Boer War in 1899.
In the Second Boer War, the British had the advantage in terms of both the number of troops and the weapons and equipment. But in the early stages of the war, the ratio of British losses to Boer losses remained lopsided. The British army suffered heavy losses, but the Boers did not seem to lose many people, so the world was shocked by this defeat, but also shook the British Empire's political status.
In order to take South Africa completely, the British in the mainland emergency conscription, deployed in South Africa to fight the Boers once up to more than 400,000 troops, and began to take all kinds of brutal means and the implementation of the Three Lights policy, the establishment of countless concentration camps in South Africa to detain Boer civilians, women, children and women and children.
In the end, the whole of the Transvaal and the Orange were annexed by the British because they were outnumbered. However the battle dealt a heavy blow to the British Empire. On the economic level, the British army in South Africa consumed about 220 million pounds of military expenditure, the national treasury savings were squandered; on the political level, the Western world launched a sympathy and solidarity movement with the Boers, and in the Netherlands and Belgium even formed a large number of civic groups to the Boers vouchers to the wartime mobile hospitals and medical equipment. At the same time, thousands of people from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, the United States, Russia, Ireland, Italy and Scandinavian countries traveled across the ocean as volunteers to fight alongside the Boers. This caused the national image of the British Empire to fall apart in the West.
The Boer War not only reshaped the British Empire, reshaped the entire international geopolitics, but also was a major turning point in the world's diplomatic, political and military history. In the war, the Boers made extensive use of modern guerrilla tactics, and as a result, the British army had to change from the bright red uniforms it had been wearing to the hidden color uniforms. The policy of universal soldiering, which had to be implemented in the face of the British army's overwhelming presence, was later widely borrowed by Germany and Switzerland in World War II and Israel after the war, and the idea of total war and universal soldiering was established. The brutal and heavy-handed policy of the British army to deal with the Boers' all-volunteer situation resulted in the scorched-earth policy, the concentration camps and the Three Lights policy, which were later borrowed by Nazi Germany and Japanese fascism. At the same time, it is also in the Boer War, the birth of such as field telephone, searchlights and many other tools of war.
After World War II, the Boers once again dominated the political landscape of South Africa and withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1961. But for all the atrocities committed by the British colonizers, the Boers were just as bad. Because of their dependence on the serfdom economy and the culture of slavery, the Boers were strongly racist and officially practiced apartheid from 1948 until the end of the Boer regime after the 1994 multiracial elections in South Africa.
To this day, the term Boer is rarely used because of its strong racist associations. The official name for the remaining Boers in South Africa has evolved to Afrikaner, based on their language. As for Britain, it is no longer the same after the post-war storm of national independence.