Second Boer War

Background

The Boer republics — the South African Republic (Transvaal) under Paul Kruger and the Orange Free State — were the two independent Afrikaner states north of the British Cape Colony. The Witwatersrand gold strike of 1886 had transformed the Transvaal from a poor agrarian republic into one of the richest gold-producing regions in the world, with a foreign (predominantly British) Uitlander population that the Kruger government denied political rights (T&H 72; AAE 32–40).

Quigley's narrative anchors the chain that led to war in the Cecil Rhodes circle. Rhodes, then Prime Minister of Cape Colony and chairman of De Beers and the British South Africa Company, organized the Jameson Raid of December 1895 — a failed armed incursion into the Transvaal intended to provoke an Uitlander rising and topple Kruger. The Raid failed, Rhodes fell from the premiership, and the cause passed to the British government in London. In 1897 Alfred Milner was sent out as High Commissioner under the new Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. Quigley's AAE reads Milner's appointment as the moment the imperial-federation project — Rhodes's life work — passed from the Cape into the hands of the Oxford-trained imperialists who would carry it for the next half-century (AAE 4–6, 36–48).

Quigley's framing — Milner, Rhodes, and the secret society

Quigley's foundational claim, set out on the first pages of AAE, is that there existed a secret society 'created by Cecil Rhodes' whose successive heads were Lord Esher (formally Rhodes's executor), Milner, and Lothian — and that this society was the executive of an Anglo-American imperial program (AAE 3–6). The Boer War is the project's first public exercise of state power.

He argues that the Group 'plotted the Jameson Raid of 1895' and 'caused the Boer War of 1899-1902' (AAE 5). The mechanism, in his telling, is Milner's deliberate frustration of the Bloemfontein Conference of May–June 1899 — the last chance for a negotiated settlement of the Uitlander franchise question. Milner's correspondence with Chamberlain, his press handling through The Times's South African correspondent (also a Milner Group affiliate), and his refusal to accept Kruger's last concessions all converged, in Quigley's reading, on producing the ultimatum that became the war's immediate cause (AAE 36–48; T&H 72).

The war itself, however, mattered less to Quigley's argument than what happened around it: Milner used the wartime administrative emergency to gather around him a corps of young Oxford men — Lionel Curtis, Philip Kerr (Lothian), Robert Brand, Geoffrey Robinson (later Dawson), Leo Amery, John Buchan, Lionel Hichens, Patrick Duncan, and others — to administer the conquered territories. This was the Kindergarten, named for Milner's habit of training his junior staff with intensive discussion-group methods adapted from Arnold Toynbee Sr.'s Oxford workshops (AAE 10, 50–62).

The war

Quigley's military analysis of the war is brief; his concern is political. The war ran in three phases: an initial Boer offensive (October 1899 – early 1900) that besieged Mafeking, Ladysmith, and Kimberley; a British conventional counter-offensive (1900) under Lord Roberts that took Bloemfontein, Pretoria, and Johannesburg and forced Kruger into exile; and a guerrilla phase (1900–1902) under Jan Smuts, Christiaan de Wet, and Louis Botha to which Kitchener responded with a scorched-earth policy, blockhouses, and concentration camps for the Boer civilian population in which approximately 26,000 women and children died (T&H 72; AAE 60).

The war was concluded by the Treaty of Vereeniging (31 May 1902). The Boer republics were annexed to the Empire but with a promise of eventual self-government and substantial British reconstruction funding. Smuts and Botha, the two leading Boer commanders, would within a decade become Milner Group collaborators and the architects of the Union of South Africa (1910) — which AAE treats as the Group's first major political construction (AAE 60–70).

Consequences

The war's primary consequence, in Quigley's account, was institutional. The Kindergarten, the personal network Milner had assembled, became after 1909 the Round Table Groups — first as a federated set of discussion circles in London, the Dominions, and (after 1910) the United States, and from 1910 as the publishing operation The Round Table journal (AAE 5, 68–88). The post-1920 institutional outgrowths — Chatham House, the CFR, the Rhodes Scholarships organized under the Rhodes Trust — all descend from this nucleus (AAE 5, 88–110).

In imperial-policy terms the war's outcome was, paradoxically, the federation of South Africa under predominantly Afrikaner political leadership: the four colonies (Cape, Natal, Transvaal, Orange Free State) united in 1910 as the Union of South Africa with Botha as first Prime Minister. The Milner Group treated this as success — the model 'dominion federation' that would, in their longer program, be the template for the entire English-speaking world (AAE 64–70).

Financially, the war cost Britain approximately £230 million (an enormous sum at the time), foreshadowed the financial dislocations of the First World War, and contributed to the political climate that produced the 1909–1910 Liberal-Tory constitutional clash over the budget. Quigley devotes less attention to these economic consequences than to the institutional ones, but they appear in passing in T&H's pre-war chapters (T&H 70–75).

Legacy

For Quigley the Boer War is the case study in how a private network — Rhodes's circle, then Milner's Kindergarten — captures state power and then uses a public crisis (the war itself, the post-war reconstruction) to build the personnel and institutions for permanent influence. The Milner Group that dominates the Versailles Conference twenty years later, founds the RIIA, dominates Round Table policy through the 1920s and 1930s, and produces the Munich appeasement of 1938 — all of it descends, in his telling, from the men Milner gathered in South Africa between 1897 and 1905 (AAE 5–10, 88–110).

The broader civilizational reading in The Evolution of Civilizations is more diagnostic: the war shows the British Empire at the height of its physical power but already past the height of its moral confidence — the concentration camps and the scorched-earth policy produced the first significant anti-imperial sentiment within Britain itself and abroad, and contributed to the loss of automatic legitimacy that imperial enterprises had enjoyed for the previous century (EoC 158–162). The war is, in this sense, both a Group triumph and a structural symptom of the larger civilization's transition out of expansion.