The Impact of the South African War.

ed. David Omissi and Andrew Thompson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002; pp. xvi + 313. 50 [pounds sterling]).

Books on the South African war of 1899-1902 are not exactly thin on the ground, but the editors of this one are right to say that most of them concentrate on its causes and conduct rather than its effects. Discussion of the latter has tended to be `speculative'--John Darwin's term, in his useful summarizing `Afterword'--partly because of the difficulty of disentangling the impact of the war from that of other contemporary factors. How precisely different would the later history of the South African colonies and their peoples have been if a settlement had been reached at Bloemfontein in June 18997 What exactly was the war's contribution to …