In reading the history of the Boer War, I get the impression that it was a very minor annoyance to the British:
-it was very far away from Europe
-it did not involve the Royal Navy (the premier force of the Empire)
-it only involved a small British force (maybe 80,000 men)
Of course, it did have ramifications-Kaiser Wilhelm secretly encouraged the Boers, and Paul Kruger’s forces initially humiliated the British army-but long term, the Boers had no chance. The war did become very brutal-particularly in the British treatment of Boer civilians-concentration camps and abuse was a terrible foretaste of WW2.
But in the scale of things, how big a deal was it to the British upper class?
It exposed a lot of mismanagement and inefficiency in the Army. After decades of colonial wars everyone expected an easy victory. Instead there was a protracted and expensive war. The opponents of Empire seized on this in domestic politics. Empires are expensive.
The war also saw the first use of units from the other colonies. Almost a dress rehearsal for the Great Was.
It was the first time since the Crimea that the UK had a real fight on their hands. Other colonial wars followed the same pattern: the natives would attack the British, who wouldsuffer a major defeat. Then the British would send more troops (with far better armed and trained) and the whole thing would be over in a few months.
The Boers did not fold, and were well-trained fighters. In addition, the British Army was shown to be full of incompetents at the top levels, probably because they never had been called on to fight a well-armed foe in their lifetime.
It wasn’t total war, but total war was unusual at the time. And though it was far, cables and telegraphs made sure people in London knew what was going on within a day of it happening.
Actually, the commitment was much larger than you think. This good article gives the total British troops involved at 500,00.
The real importance of the Boer War is it showed how weak (both domestically and worldwide) in many ways Britain really was. Considering how the British greatly outnumbered the Boer forces, who numbered at most 90,000, the war should have been over much more quickly. Something like 40% of army volunteers had to be rejected due to poor health. Many Britons feared industrialization had weakened the “English race”. Internationally, the war was strongly opposed. There was much talk of an international anti-British coalition. In response, Britain tried to get closer to the U.S. and launched a rare peacetime coalition with its traditional enemy France.
In the short run, it was indeed a minor annoyance. Anything other than total war is a minor annoyance to an empire.
To the people in a country, the realities of any war (not fought on their soil) are magnified. Their relatives die; their taxes increase; their confidence in their countries and leaders is disrupted. We’ve seen that with Korea and Vietnam and the two Gulf wars. But compared to our world supremacy and a $16 trillion economy, they were mere blips.
A colonial war that wouldn’t have involved other leading powers was in real historical terms a nothingness. So there were threats of an anti-British coalition. A loud sneeze brought threats of an anti-British coalition, and the same for anything that happened in any other power of the day. It’s more of interest to military buffs than to economists. Historians can mine these little conflicts for future import, but you can’t say that the Boer War changed anything about Britain.
For any major power, part of its power is reputation. If a country has a reputation for winning wars, other countries avoid challenging it in battle. Conversely if a country experiences difficulty in a war, its reputation is diminished and other countries become more willing to oppose it.
As installLSC noted, this number is simply wrong; the only explanation I can think of is you are mistaking the size of the Boer force for that of the British, total Boer strength was ~88,000.
This is my favorite typo this week! Now I am nostalgic for the Great Was. 
Does he give sweets to children?
I think you hit it there. When the sun doesn’t set on your empire you have to worry about every little uprising. The war may have been an annoyance, the potential effect on the rest of their colonies would have been more disturbing.
The British had been fighting colonial wars for most of the 19th century, with major operations in Egypt, Afghanistan, and Indian. They were always worried about rebellions in the colonies and always determined, after that, um, incident in the Americas, never to lose. That the Boers had some initial success just multiplied that determination.
The Boer War would be more major if it led to other colonial uprisings. It didn’t. I don’t remember a single colonial war fought by the British before WWI.
The Great Wart [is that a better typo than the Great Was?] truly changed British life, the class structure, the relations with the colonies, and the country’s economic foundation. The Boer War did none of these things. An event that leads to no imitators and has no effects on the greater society is a minor annoyance.
People (by which I mean men) are besotted with wars. But only a tiny handful are historically significant. Electricity and the automobile changed Britain 1,000,000% more, but they’re apparently not as much fun to discuss.
Thanks for the replies. The interesting this (to me) was that the initial defeats and incompetence spurred some major reforms to the British Army. This resulted in a very well trained army, with excellent skills-the Germans in 1914 noted the excellent skills of the BEF-they knew how to exploit every battlefield advantage, and were such god riflemen , that the Germans thought they were facing machine gun fire.
Sadly, these seasoned soldiers were largely wasted-they were thrown into frontal assaults, by generals who hadn’t learned anything.
More than annoyance, IIRC the war pushed some internal British tensions, as the war was definitely not 100% popular. It was explicitly an aggressive action, the clear result of an expansionist and conquering British policy, and unlike so-caleld “imperialist wars” of today, the victors didn’t set up a half-way decent government, pour money into the place to look good, and eventually leave.
Britain had previously annexed the Boer in what is now the region around Cape Town. The British evidently made themselves so hated in such a brief amount of time that the Voertrekkers simply packed up and left to go far inland (making the British substantially responsible for several more population displacements and some fo the later ethnic and racial tensions in the region). Then the British actually came after them, apparently on the belief that no foreigners living abroad should escape taxation or general obnoxiousness. I’m serious: some of these people would have lived through at least four separate British annexations.
In fact, there was not one but two Boer Wars, but it’s the second which rightly gets more attention. Given the relatively limited scale and the usual tendencies of wars of the era to spare noncombatants suffering, it was one of the most brutal and inhuman engagements in history. A lot of people in Britain were not exactly happy at the what the war turned into, particularly if they weren’t terribly fond of the Empire; these opinions cut across class and political associations. The Conservatives* seem to feel they were stuck with the war even if they were uncomfortable with it simply because it was started on their watch. The Radical Liberal faction criticized the brutality of the war, but was less focuse dont he conceptual justice of the war itself, and most Liberals probably didn’t care but it would eventually get them a lot of votes.
It led to radical shifts in government policy, a period of British introspection and reform even if not always very intelligent reform, and a major international realignment which would help set the stage for WW1.
**Who, weirdly, would probably be closer to modern-day liberals in rough social outlook.
Nope: walkable dinosaurs.
I think the Boer War had more significance than that. Robert Massie, for example, saw it as an important step on the path to the Great War. Germany came away with the idea that Britain could be challenged and began to earnestly pursue a naval race. Britain saw that it had been diplomatically isolated and began making serious plans for alliances with Japan, France, and Russia.
Everything is connected. Every event has a number of effects on the society, both immediately and later on. And every event has a multitude of people making connections backward in hindsight, some of which are accurate and some are made to support a thesis. This is a general truth, and nothing to do with Massie, whom I haven’t read. He may be completely correct in what you report. Whether he is or isn’t is irrelevant. There were several zillion steps on the path to the Great War, and it would have happened even if South Africa as a country never existed. That’s part of my definition of whether an event was major or not. We seem to have such totally different definitions that we’ll never agree on this.
Yes, but I’m not talking about one of a zillion factors. If you’re talking about the British entry into World War I, the Boer War is in the top five reasons.
I also wonder how much the war influenced the USA-we had our own “splendid little war” going on in the Philippines-with brutal slaughter of thousands of “insurgents”. The Spanish-American War pitted the laughably ill-equipped US forces against the equally laughable antique Spanish forces. What saved the USA was the fact that Spain wasn’t up to the task of holding on to their remnant empire.
I continue to disagree. I pulled some books off the shelf, about the Great War and more general histories of Europe through those times, and the Boer War gets basically a sentence. That true for Massie’s Castles of Steel, too, according to Google Books. Dreadnaught gives it part of a chapter, pairing it with the Boxer Rebellion in China. The Boer War had contemporary repercussions. It was not a major event.
Since the Spanish-American War started in 1898 and the Phillipines War in February 1899, while the Second Boer War began in October 1899, I’d say not much.
How much influence did Cecil Rhodes (founder of the DeBeers diamond monopoly) have over GB? Rhodes had major investments in S. Africa; a Boer victory would have cost him a lot of $$.