MORE SOUTH AFRICAN SHENANIGANS The Origins of the South African War, 1899–1902. By IAIN R. SMITH. London and New York: Longman, 1995. Pp. xix + 455. £15.99 (ISBN 0-582-27777-9).

Abstract

In some ways, The Origins of the South African War 1899–1902 is an awfully fat book for what has perhaps become an awfully thin and fatiguing subject. Do we really need yet another stab at J. A. Hobson on the Jameson Raid and the notion of the capitalist conspiracy war? Is there much to be gained from further deliberation over the 1896 Selborne Memorandum dealing with the crisis in South Africa? Despite Dr Smith's suggestion (p. x) that recent historiography of the South African War has been preoccupied more with the experience of that conflict than with its origins, the fact remains that modern English-language scholarship on the causes of the war, starting well over three decades ago with Robinson and Gallagher's Africa and the Victorians, continues to outweigh heavily writing on the actual conduct of hostilities between Britain and the Boer republics. We continue to know much more about the pre-war shenanigans between Milner and the Uitlanders than about the relationship between technology and strategy during 1899–1902 or the demographic consequences of an exhausting war. So, the question must be: does Iain Smith breathe new life into the enormously complex, broadly familiar, sometimes tedious, historical arguments over the origins of the South African War?