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Throughout the 19th century, British and Boer settlers (people of largely Dutch ancestry) in Southern Africa were frequent rivals as they established new settlements and competed for resources. At the expense of African peoples in the region, the British founded the colonies of Cape Colony (1806) and Natal (1843), and the Boers created the two neighbouring republics of Transvaal (1852) and Orange Free State (1854). The British and Boer rivalry broke out into open warfare in the First Anglo-Boer War of 1880-1881 and again in the much larger Boer War of 1899-1902. This gallery of images tells the story of this rivalry, one eventually won by the British Empire, which formed the single colony of South Africa in 1910.

The Boer conflicts had a high cost, the Second Boer War alone cost Britain £200 million (equivalent to 21 thousand million today). More and more voices in Britain, among which was that of the economist and social scientist J. A. Hobson (1858-1940), began to question the point of imperialist foreign policy both from an economic and moral perspective.