The Hall Handbook of the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902

Abstract

Darrell Hall. The Hall Handbook of the Anglo-Boer 1899-1902. Edited by Fransjohan Pretorius and Gilbert Toralge. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1999. x + 272 pp. Photographs. Tables. Maps. Illustrations. Bibliography. $50.00. Cloth. Martin F. Marix Evans. Encyclopedia of the Boer 1899-1902. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio Inc., 2000. xxviii + 414 pp. Photographs. Tables. Maps. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. $75.00. Cloth. The centenary of the 1899-1902 Anglo-Boer War has brought forth a raft of books, from American, British, and South African publishers, as well a number of seminars, especially in South Africa. This has enabled scholars from South Africa, the rest of the Commonwealth, and the United States to delve into topics that were previously slighted, to discuss new (archival) sources, challenges, and interpretations, and to place that conflict within the wider context of historiography and social science. Particularly noteworthy has been a willingness of some Afrikaner historians to take a somewhat iconoclastic view of what had previously been the Afrikaner orthodoxy on the war, an orthodoxy that bolstered the rise and subsequent entrenchment of Afrikaner nationalism within the South African ethnic state. (See, for instance, Andre Wessels's extraordinarily perceptive chapter, at War, in John Gooch, ed., The Boer War: Direction, Experience and Image [London: Frank Cass Ltd., 2000], as well as Ian J. van der Waag's Re-Fighting the Second Anglo-Boer War: Historians in the Trenches, Journal for Contemporary History 27 [2], 2002.) As a result, there is something of a new view, rather than a deja vu. The cast of characters has grown, with those who were Orwellian unpersons at the time (due to the myopia of white supremacy shared, albeit in somewhat different forms, by both the Afrikaners and their imperial opponents in the war) now advanced to full historical actor status. There is some degree of overlap between these two reference works, and Martin Marix Evans often cites the late Darrell Hall's volume as a source for some of his data. Yet the Hall work tilts heavily toward the military (and naval) direction, whereas the Marix Evans volume covers a wider array of subjects, including the military. This can be explained in some measure by the background of each author. Hall, who died in 1996, was a South African, attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, and spent twenty years in the British army. Marix Evans graduated from Cambridge University and has published several works on military history (including an earlier one on the Anglo-Boer War). Hall's bibliography, although considerably shorter than the one in Marix Evans's book (three pages versus six pages, respectively), includes Dutch- and Afrikaans-language sources, as well as materials in English, while Marix Evans's bibliography is limited to English-language materials. Marix Evans draws heavily on articles in Soldiers of the Queen, the journal of the Victorian Military Society, a source that Hall does not cite. However, Marix Evans overlooks the equally useful Militaria and Military History Journal, two South African journals devoted to military history that frequently publish valuable articles on the second Anglo-Boer War. Neither bibliography includes a listing of other bibliographies on that conflict, and neither cites any unpublished theses and dissertations, although Marix Evans does refer to the U. …