This exciting new book marks a major shift in the study of the South African War. It turns attention from the war's much debated causes onto its more neglected consequences. An international team of scholars explores the myriad legacies of the war - for South Africa, for Britain, for the Empire and beyond. The extensive introduction sets the contributions in context, and the elegant afterword offers thought-provoking reflections on their cumulative significance.
The South African War rounded off the British conquest of Southern Africa. Only now, a hundred years later, are some of the more baleful legacies of the war being addressed. This new history is an up-to-date account of the military struggle in South Africa including the whole web of miscalculations and shattered illusions that surrounded it which spread far beyond the battlefields.
This is the first general history of the concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer or South African War in over fifty years, and the first to use in depth the very rich and extensive official documents in South African and British archives. It provides a fresh perspective on a topic that has understandably aroused huge emotions because of the great numbers of Afrikaners, especially women and children, who died in the camps. This fascinating social history overturns many of the previously held assumptions and conclusions on all sides, and is sure to stimulate debate. Rather than viewing the camps simply as the product of the scorched-earth policies of the war, the author sets them in the larger context of colonialism at the end of the 19th century, arguing that British views on poverty, poor relief and the management of colonial societies all shaped their administration. The book also attempts to explain why the camps were so badly administered in the first place, and why reform was so slow, suggesting that divided responsibility, ignorance, political opportunism and a failure to understand the needs of such institutions all played their part.
This text brings together contributions from scholars in South African and imperial history to examine the international dimensions of the war, including a historiographical review of a century of writing on the origins of the war.
First-rate military history, A War of Frontier and Empire retells an often forgotten chapter in America's past, infusing it with commanding contemporary relevance. It has been termed an insurgency, a revolution, a guerrilla war, and a conventional war. As David J. Silbey demonstrates in this taut, compelling history, the 1899 Philippine-American War was in fact all of these. Played out over three distinct conflicts—one fought between the Spanish and the allied United States and Filipino forces; one fought between the United States and the Philippine Army of Liberation; and one fought between occupying American troops and an insurgent alliance of often divided Filipinos—the war marked America's first steps as a global power and produced a wealth of lessons learned and forgotten.
This book deals with creolization and pidginization of language, culture and identity and makes use of interdisciplinary approaches developed in the study of the latter. Creolization and pidginization are conceptualized and investigated as specific social processes in the course of which new common languages, socio-cultural practices and identifications are developed under distinct social and political conditions and in different historical and local contexts of diversity. The contributions show that creolization and pidginization are important strategies to deal with identity and difference in a world in which diversity is closely linked with inequalities that relate to specific group memberships, colonial legacies and social norms and values.