Historiographical reflections on the significance of the South African War

Abstract

The South African War has had more ink spilt on it than any other topic in South African history. A flood of books have been published since the centenary commemorat ions began in October 1999. Before this, it was the causes/origins of the war, rather than the war itself, that attracted most attention among professional historians. In the 1980s and 1990s there was a shift from 'drum and trumpet history', concerned with military aspects of the war, to its social history. 1 But relatively little scholarly work has been done on the wider significance of the war in South African history. Though the impact of the war on British and global politics, and other parts of the Empire, has now begun to be tackled, 2 we still lack a comprehensive, scholarly assessment of the consequences of the war for South Africa itself. With the centenary of the end of the war fast approaching, historians should surely turn their attention from the war itself, and the debate on its causes, and spend more time debating its consequences . 3 In this short article, I cannot even begin to tackle this agenda, but I