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RR 2000/432 Encyclopedia of the Boer War 1899-1902 Martin Marix Evans ABC-Clio Santa Barbara, CA and Oxford 2000 xxvii + 414 pp. ISBN 1 85109 342 7
L44.95
Keywords War, History
When the reviewer first became aware of the Boer War it was only 40 years distant; now it is a century since Goodbye Dolly Grey topped the charts and Mafeking was relieved. It was not just another colonial war waged against ill-armed native tribesmen in the cause of Christianity and civilisation, but a fitting precursor to a sick and diseased century. If the tank, the use of poison gas, the invention and use of chemical and nuclear weapons were still in the future, the Boer War marked all too visibly the progress, history and evolution of modern warfare. And it was fought by two European peoples: the Dutch had arrived in South Africa as early as 1652 to establish a convenient port-of-call for the ships of the Vereenigde Oostindische Companie to and from its trading empire in the East Indies, while the British arrived on the scene in...