- 5/23/2025
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00:00In the last years of Queen Victoria's reign, there seemed no limit to what could be achieved
00:15by British military and economic might.
00:22As rival European empires scrambled to divide up the uncolonised world, a new breed of British
00:28imperialists could confidently insist on taking the limeshare.
00:35Yet in the space of a few years, as the 19th century gave way to the 20th, arrogance turned
00:41to anxiety.
00:49And even before the Queen Empress expired in 1901, came the fall from grace.
00:57Africa, which had seemed to be British by right, dealt the empire an unexpected and
01:04agonising blow.
01:08A colonial war that wasn't a walkover, but a bloody slog.
01:16And Britain's imperial rivals weren't slow to scent the opportunity that this new vulnerability
01:22presented.
01:46What happened in this remote African landscape 110 years ago typified what came to be known
02:05as the Scramble for Africa, though the scramble of Africa would be closer to the mark.
02:16Once the British had come to Africa to stamp out slavery and spread Christianity, their
02:22motives for carving the continent up like a cake were very different.
02:27One part economics, one part grand strategy, no part altruism.
02:34In the mid-19th century, apart from a few coastal stations, Africa was the last blank
02:39sheet in the imperial world atlas.
02:42Even in the space of just a couple of decades, what had been 10,000 independent African kingdoms
02:48were turned into just 40 European colonies.
02:51Never in human history had there been such a drastic redrawing of the map of a continent.
02:56By 1900, Britain owned literally half of Africa.
03:05The key to the extraordinary expansion of the British empire through the uncharted lands
03:09of Africa was firepower backed by financial power.
03:17This combination was personified by two titans of the age.
03:22The mining tycoon Cecil Rhodes and the banker Nathaniel Rothschild.
03:31For Rothschild, Africa was a potentially huge source of minerals, above all gold.
03:40In 1888, he agreed to finance the development of a new gold concession Rhodes had acquired
03:46north of the Zambezi River.
03:50The land Rhodes coveted belonged to the Matabele.
03:53Rhodes had acquired a claim to it with a promise of 500 pounds and a shaky cross from the Matabele
03:59chief Lobengula.
04:02But when Lobengula realized he'd been hoodwinked into signing over not just mineral rights,
04:07but all his rights, he decided to take Rhodes on.
04:19The Matabele had, by African standards, a powerful and well-organized army.
04:25Rhodes' mercenaries held the trump card.
04:34The Maxim machine gun.
04:41The Maxim fired 50 times faster than the fastest rifle.
04:49And with fantastic accuracy.
05:02Fifteen hundred Matabele warriors were wiped out.
05:09Just four of the invaders died.
05:13Lest anyone should be in any doubt as to who had masterminded the operation, the conquered
05:17territory was renamed Rhodesia.
05:27This is the official Matabele land campaign souvenir from the Kimberley Library, which
05:32kicks off with Mr. Rhodes' tribute to the conquerors of the Matabele savages.
05:38But the real highlight is this extraordinary hymn to the expedition's favourite weapon.
05:42It was actually a satire on the expedition, but Rhodes' men brazenly adopted it as their
05:47anthem and it's to the tune of Onward Christian Soldiers.
05:52Onwards, chartered soldiers, on to heathen lands.
06:00Prayer books in your pockets, rifles in your hands.
06:05Take the glorious tidings, where trade can be done.
06:09Spread the peaceful gospel with the Maxim gun.
06:16In 1901, Hiram Maxim, the American-born inventor of this unrivalled device for spreading the
06:22gospel of British power, was knighted for services to the empire.
06:29Rothschild, Lord Rothschild, was on the board of his company too.
06:35But carving out his own personal country was only part of Rhodes' plan.
06:39This is the map on which he drew a pencil line from Cape Town to Cairo, which he dreamt
06:44of linking by a single transcontinental railway line.
06:49From Cape Town it would run like some huge metal spine through Betuana land, from Betuana
06:55land through Rhodesia, from Rhodesia to Nyasa land, past the Great Lakes and all the way
07:03up to Khartoum, and then from Khartoum up the Nile through Egypt.
07:13This was empire building as only a megalomaniac could imagine it.
07:17Ultimately, Rhodes saw the whole African continent coming under British domination.
07:29Rhodes justified this railroad imperialism when he said, we are the first race in the
07:34world, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race.
07:44That was another way of saying that what was good for Rhodes' British South Africa Company
07:49was good for the British Empire, and what was good for the British Empire was good for
07:54the world.
08:01Campaigns like this one against the Matabele were run by businessmen.
08:05They were private campaigns, planned in private clubs, like this one, founded by Rhodes and
08:11Kimberley.
08:15Matabele land had been added to the British Empire, but at no cost to the taxpayer, because
08:19the campaign had been fought by mercenaries, paid for by Rhodes, or rather by the shareholders
08:24in his British South African and De Beers companies.
08:28In effect, colonisation had been privatised.
08:32If there was gold in Matabele land, the return would be mind-boggling.
08:37Rhodes was learning from history.
08:39British rule in India had begun with the East India Company.
08:43Now British rule in Africa would be based on his business interests.
08:49But that was only half the story, because back in London, the British government was
08:54playing an African game of its own.
08:56While Rhodes was working his way northwards from the Cape, the politicians were working
09:00southwards from Cairo.
09:10In 1882, a momentous decision was taken here in the Foreign Office to occupy Egypt and
09:16so secure the Suez Canal and Britain's lines of communication to her most important possession,
09:22India.
09:24In North Africa, the issue wasn't so much economic as strategic.
09:31It was the British occupation of Egypt that really triggered the African scramble.
09:36As far as the other European powers were concerned, it was imperative to act, and act quickly,
09:40before the British gobbled up the entire continent.
09:43British themselves were happy to share, provided they hung on to the plump properties.
09:47In other words, the biggest game of monopoly in world history was about to begin, with
09:52Africa as the board.
09:54Only now, there was a new and unpredictable player sitting at the table.
10:11In 1885, the British consul in this East African spice island received a telegram from the Foreign
10:17Office.
10:23It announced that the Chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, had staked a claim to the
10:29Sultan of Zanzibar's mainland possessions.
10:34Moreover, the British government instructed the consul to cooperate with Germany in everything.
10:45The consul was John Kirk, a disciple of the great missionary explorer David Livingstone.
10:53Kirk had spent a decade using British influence over Sultan Barghash bin Said to end the slave
10:59trade in East Africa.
11:06In return, Kirk had guaranteed the Sultan British protection.
11:11The order to cooperate with the Germans astounded him.
11:19Here in the archives, you can follow Kirk's struggle to come to terms with the new situation.
11:24In June 1885, the Prime Minister himself wrote, ordering Kirk to act with great caution and
11:31not permit any communications of a hostile tone to be addressed to German agents.
11:37Well, Kirk replied in diplomatic language that this put him in a delicate and difficult
11:42position, but we know what he really thought.
11:44From a private letter he wrote to a friend, Germany means to absorb the whole of Zanzibar.
11:52Why was I not told, he wrote, and concluded, this German colonisation scheme is a farce.
11:59We bid fair to lose the fairly good protection and freedom we have under the Sultan in exchange
12:05for a long period of confusion when all my work will be undone.
12:09Well, he was dead right.
12:11The Sultan's empire was about to be carved up to suit European power politics.
12:31That August, Bismarck sent four warships into this harbour and demanded the Sultan
12:36make over his mainland territory to Germany.
12:43By the time they left a month later, the Sultan had lost his empire.
12:51In the new game of imperial monopoly, Africa was being carved up between the European states.
12:57If Germany would back the British takeover of Egypt, then the British government was
13:02only too happy to throw Germany a chunk of East Africa.
13:09What had happened was that the high moralism of the generation that had striven to rid
13:14Africa of slavery had been ditched.
13:19Zanzibar was just a petty piece of property to be traded as part of a much bigger game.
13:27By the end of the 1890s, the scramble for Africa was drawing to a close.
13:31A continent that had been ruled by Africans for millennia was now almost entirely in European
13:36hands.
13:37There was almost nothing about this for Africans to celebrate, but for the British, now unquestionably
13:42the masters of the globe, there had never been a better excuse for a party.
13:46The lion's share, not just of Africa, but of the entire world, now belonged to the great
13:51white queen across the ocean.
14:10In 1897, the year of her diamond jubilee, Queen Victoria reigned over the most extensive
14:16empire in world history.
14:28Loyal subjects from five continents flocked to London to pay homage to their queen.
14:35According to the St James's Gazette, the Queen Empress held sway over one continent, a hundred
14:41peninsulas, a thousand lakes, two thousand rivers, ten thousand islands.
14:49The British Empire now covered a quarter of the globe.
14:56But amid all the pomp and imperial plumage, there was also a flicker of pessimism.
15:02The British elite knew too much ancient history to be entirely complacent about their position
15:06of world dominance.
15:08Surely there were those who looked forward uneasily to the decline and fall of their
15:12own empire, like the Roman Empire before it.
15:24Great empires seldom last long.
15:30They are, by their very nature, liable to special evils, to which, in time, they succumb.
15:37The wrong choice for England will reduce her to the level of Spain.
15:47The man who wrote those visionary words was the Cambridge historian John Seeley.
15:53But unlike the other prophets of imperial decline, Seeley thought he had an antidote.
16:00It was time to give the empire a new rationale, to turn a sprawling, multiracial conglomerate
16:07into something more tightly knit and whiter, a Greater Britain.
16:19Seeley argued that because British subjects in the white colonies – Canada, South Africa,
16:24New Zealand and Australia – would soon outnumber those at home, an imperial federation could
16:29be created.
16:37This new and Greater Britain would surely be a match for the emerging American and Russian
16:42superpowers.
16:49Seeley insisted that only by knitting this Greater Britain together could the empire
16:53hope to compete with the superpowers of the future.
16:56Admittedly, he himself was no empire builder.
16:59Dogged by insomnia and a nagging wife, he was a byword in Cambridge for dull, donnish
17:04gravitas.
17:05But his ideas captured the imagination of a new generation of imperialists.
17:10The result was to be a transformation in government policy towards the empire.
17:19Seeley's ideas soon found a champion in high places.
17:24This was the first authentically, self-consciously imperialist politician.
17:30And he was unapologetic about Greater Britain's right to govern the world.
17:36He was the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain.
17:43I believe in the British Empire, and I believe that the British race is the greatest of governing
17:49races that the world has ever seen.
17:54No change of climate or condition can alter that proud, persistent, self-asserting and
18:00resolute stock.
18:04Chamberlain's imperialism had, and was intended to have, immense popular appeal.
18:08It was partly a matter of targeting voters' economic self-interest.
18:13Empire meant foreign markets, and foreign markets meant jobs.
18:17But imperialism was also popular for one simple reason.
18:21It was so exciting.
18:29There were 72 separate British military campaigns in the course of Queen Victoria's reign, more
18:35than one for every year of the so-called Pax Britannica.
18:44And small wars were grist to the mill of a new force, the press.
18:50And the Empire provided its indispensable ingredient, good copy.
18:58As Lord Northcliffe, the proprietor of the Daily Mail, put it,
19:02The British people relish a good hero, and a good hate.
19:18The heroes of this popular imperialism weren't themselves men of the people.
19:22They were members of an elite, educated at Britain's exclusive public schools.
19:27And what made them heroic wasn't their academic attainments, but their prowess on the games
19:32field.
19:33Indeed, as the 1890s wore on, the British Empire came to resemble a vast sports complex.
19:42If any sport summed up the new spirit of constructive imperialism, and Sealy's idea of a greater
19:52Britain, it was rugby.
19:58Rugby wasn't just the hooligans' game played by gentlemen.
20:02It was a training ground for a generation of empire builders.
20:11The poet Henry Newbolt made the parallel explicit, imagining a British army being rallied by
20:16the schoolboy cry, play up, play up, and play the game.
20:31No one summed up the new ethos of sporting imperialism better than Robert Stevie Baden-Powell.
20:39Baden-Powell had progressed inexorably from sporting success at Charterhouse to an army
20:45career in India, Afghanistan, and Africa.
20:55As he graduated from Captain of the First Eleven to Colonial Commander, Baden-Powell
21:00came to see imperial war as, quite simply, the ultimate team sport.
21:12We are all Britons, and it is our duty each to play in his place and help his neighbours.
21:20Then we shall remain strong and united, and then there will be no fear of the whole building,
21:26namely our great empire, falling down because of rotten bricks in the war.
21:35Country first, self second, should be your motto.
21:46Country first, self second.
21:48You can see exactly what that meant in practice here in the cloisters at Charterhouse, which
21:53are chock full of memorials to every conceivable imperial campaign from all the corners of
21:58the globe.
21:59Matabele Land, Afghanistan, Agra, Isandlwana, Dum-Dum.
22:06Hundreds of young men who played up, played up, and played the game, and paid for it with
22:11their lives.
22:17But what about the other side in this great imperial game?
22:21If the British really were the master race, with a god-given right to rule the world,
22:25one thing had to be established beyond doubt.
22:28Those they fought against in Africa were their natural-born inferiors.
22:51Distorting beyond recognition the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, a new generation
22:56of scientists lent their expertise to the imperial cause by ranking the human races
23:02on the basis of external physical features.
23:05Anglo-Saxons, the inhabitants of Greater Britain, were at the top.
23:11Blacks, i.e. everybody else, were at the bottom.
23:18George Combe, a leading phrenologist, claimed to be able to identify racial characteristics
23:24from the shape of skulls.
23:30When we regard the different quarters of the globe, we are struck with the extreme dissimilarity
23:36in the attainments of the varieties of men who inhabit them.
23:42In the skull of the Negro, the greatest deficiencies lie in conscientiousness, cautiousness, and
23:49reflection.
23:51To the Negro, remove only pain and hunger, and it is naturally a state of enjoyment.
24:00For the purveyors of this scientific snake oil, war wasn't just a game.
24:08It was a form of natural selection.
24:15This was eugenics, and its most strident voice was the professor of eugenics at University
24:21College London, Karl Pearson.
24:27Human progress depends on racial fitness, and the supreme test of this fitness is war.
24:38When war ceases, mankind will no longer progress, for there will be nothing to check the fertility
24:45of inferior stock.
24:49Fortunately, with an ever-expanding empire, there was no shortage of racially inferior
24:55opponents.
24:56How gratifying to think that in massacring them with their Maxim guns, the British were
25:01contributing to the progress of mankind, and that progress showed no sign of slowing.
25:07Just a year after Victoria's Jubilee, the British embarked on what was to be the archetypal
25:12war of empire.
25:13There would never be another like it.
25:26What happened here in 1898 was the zenith of Victorian imperialism.
25:39The last hurrah of the generation that regarded world domination as its racial right.
25:49The Battle of Omdurman was to pit the full military might of the biggest empire in world
25:54history against an army of desert tribesmen.
26:04Once again, the British were drawn to extend their imperial reach by a combination of strategic
26:09and economic calculations.
26:12In part, the thrust into Sudan was a response to the ambitions of other powers, particularly
26:17the French, who had designs on the upper waters of the Nile.
26:21It also appealed to the city bankers with their extensive investments in neighbouring
26:25Egypt.
26:26But to the great British public, none of this mattered.
26:30For them, the subjugation of Sudan was a matter of revenge, pure and simple.
26:42Since the early 1880s, the Sudan had been the scene of a full-blown religious revolution.
26:52A humbly born holy man calling himself the Mahdi had mustered a vast army of dervishes,
27:01the fanatical whirling dervishes.
27:05The dervishes were ready to die for the Mahdi's brand of Islamic fundamentalism.
27:17The man dispatched to Khartoum to deal with the crisis, General Charles Gordon, was convinced
27:23he could smash up the Mahdi single-handed.
27:27In the event, a year after his arrival, he was hacked to pieces on the steps of this
27:33palace.
27:36It would be 13 years before the British saw Gordon avenged.
27:47In 1886, army engineers began to build a railway from Egypt, south across the Sahara Desert,
27:53to the Sudan.
27:56The 2,000 miles of track, laid at three miles a day, had no economic value.
28:02This was a strategic railway, designed to reassert the supremacy of Greater Britain.
28:14The invasion of Sudan was led by General Herbert Horatio Kitchener, one of Gordon's most avid
28:19admirers.
28:23Kitchener was also a ruthless military technician.
28:30He meant to teach the dervishes an unforgettable lesson.
28:36This map shows how the two civilisations clashed at Omdurman.
28:40On one side, the desert-dwelling Islamic fundamentalists.
28:44On the other, the well-drilled Christian soldiers of Greater Britain.
28:48You can see how the two sides lined up.
28:51The dervishes spread out across the plain over there.
28:55Kitchener's force of 20,000, by contrast, were drawn up in their distinctive squares
29:00here with their backs to the Nile.
29:08Standing in the British lines was the young Winston Churchill, a harrow-educated army
29:12officer who'd wangled his way into the force as a war correspondent for the Morning Post.
29:19What he saw astonished him.
29:34They were chanting ceaselessly, La, La Ha, Ila, La Wa, Muhammad, Rasul, Allah.
29:43There is one God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.
29:53Instantly the hungry and attentive Maxims opened fire on them, sweeping them all to
29:59the ground, some in death, others in terror.
30:08The whole scene flickered exactly like a cinematograph picture.
30:13And besides, I remember no sound.
30:17The yells of the enemy, the shouts of the soldiers, the firing of many shots, the clashing
30:22of swords and spear were unnoticed by the senses.
30:31The picture lasted only a moment, but the memory remains forever.
30:44In the aftermath, Churchill was troubled by what he'd seen.
30:49The dervishes simply hadn't stood a chance against what he called that mechanical scattering
30:54of death which the polite nations of the earth had brought to such monstrous perfection.
31:0111,000 dervishes died that day, only 48 British soldiers.
31:11Surveying the corpses after the battle, Kitchener laconically remarked to his men that the enemy
31:16had been given a good dusting.
31:18A hundred years on, after the Gulf War against Iraq, the Americans would call this kind of
31:22thing a turkey shoot.
31:24The lesson of Omdurman seemed clear.
31:26Nobody messed with British power and got away with it.
31:29But there was another lesson that was less reassuring for the victors.
31:39The Germans had been watching with interest.
31:42Their military attache with Kitchener's army, Major von Tiedemann, duly noted the devastating
31:48effect of the British Maxim guns.
31:51For Tiedemann, the lesson of Omdurman was simple.
31:54If the British ever stood in the way of German ambitions, the only way to beat them was to
31:59match their firepower.
32:04The truth of this would be demonstrated within the year when many of the same soldiers who
32:08fought in the Sudan were dispatched to South Africa.
32:12They went expecting another Omdurman, another turkey shoot, but this time the turkeys shot
32:18back.
32:22By 1899, there was only one tribe in Southern Africa that still defied the might of the
32:28British Empire.
32:30They had already fought the British once to retain their independence.
32:36And they had the sympathy of the Germans.
32:41They were the Boers.
32:45The Boers descended from the early Dutch settlers of the Cape.
32:50The Boers saw no reason why they should share their land with the British or compromise
32:56their way of life under British rule.
33:02To Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain, the Boers' independent-mindedness was intolerable.
33:08Not least because one of their republics, the Transvaal, was sitting on an immense seam
33:14of gold.
33:17But there was one good reason why the Boers couldn't simply be trampled underfoot like
33:21the other African tribes.
33:23It wasn't so much that they were white.
33:25It was the fact that they were extremely well armed.
33:34Fully expecting another war with the British, the Boers duly stocked up with the latest
33:38armaments.
33:40German-made Maxim guns, and also from Germany, caseloads of the latest Mauser rifles, accurate
33:46over 2,000 yards.
33:49There's no question that the British cynically provoked the Boer war, presuming that the
33:53other side could be bullied into giving up their independence.
33:56Yet when war actually came, the Boers quickly exposed the shortcomings of the British army.
34:02Not only were they well armed, they were crack shots.
34:20By Christmas 1899, the architects of the war were in utter disarray.
34:30Officer Fredvers Buller, fresh from the turkey shoot of Omdurman, had been sent to relieve
34:3512,000 British troops besieged in Ladysmith.
34:46On the 24th of January, 1900, Buller's troops were ordered to scale the rocky face of the
34:52strategically vital Spion Kop under cover of night.
35:00In the thick dawn mist, the British hacked out a perfunctory trench, confident that they'd
35:05won an easy victory.
35:10In fact, they had completely misread the lie of the land.
35:14From the surrounding hills, they were fatally exposed to Boer artillery and rifle fire.
35:20As the mist cleared, the slaughter began.
35:28A fierce and furious shell fire was opened forthwith on the summit.
35:35The shells were falling at the rate of seven or eight a minute, and the shrapnel lashed
35:40the British troops.
35:44Once again, the witness was Ace Imperial War correspondent Winston Churchill.
35:51Dead and injured, smashed and broken by the shells, littered the summit until it was a
35:56bloody, reeking shambles.
36:02Corpses lay here and there.
36:04Many of the wounds were of a horrible nature.
36:16At least 1,000 officers and men, or half the force exposed to the fire, were killed or
36:23wounded in this cramped space.
36:29This time, it was the British who were the turkeys.
36:35And their humiliation was watched with interest by the army's ubiquitous shadow, the German
36:41military attache.
36:49It made perfect sense to the Germans, who'd manufactured the Boer's arsenal.
36:56But to the readers of the Daily Mail, it was scarcely credible.
37:01Greater Britain was being beaten hollow by 30,000 Dutch farmers.
37:11What the Vietnam War was to the United States, the Boer War very nearly was to the British
37:17Not just in terms of lives lost, 45,000 men killed in all, but also in terms of sheer
37:23cost.
37:24A quarter of a billion pounds was serious money in those days.
37:28The challenge to the jingoists of the popular press was how to make something that looked
37:32so like a defeat feel like another imperial victory.
37:39Well, this is Mafeking, a rather dreary, sun-baked town on the edge of the Kalahari.
38:00You can almost smell the desert.
38:02There's not much to look at, but it was even less to look at 100 years ago, when there
38:08was just a railway line and six blocks of houses.
38:12We didn't really think it was worth fighting over.
38:28Yet when the small garrison of British troops stationed here found themselves surrounded
38:32by the Boers, the British press barons found the front-page story they'd been praying for.
38:43Mafeking would be the venue for one of the last great imperial war games.
38:53This is all that's left of the cricket pavilion at Mafeking.
38:56In many ways, it's an appropriate setting, because the siege came to be seen as a kind
39:01of imperial cricket match, a sort of seven-month test between England and the Transvaal.
39:06Desperate for a victory, the public back at home hung onto every report from Mafeking.
39:11And as luck would have it, the England XI fielded the perfect captain.
39:19The man who led the defence of Mafeking was none other than that old charterhouse man
39:24and former games captain, Stevie Baden-Powell.
39:33After five months under siege, he penned a letter to the Boer commander.
39:39Just now, we are having our innings, and have so far scored 200 days not out against the
39:46bowlings of Crogney, Snyman and Botha.
39:50And we are having a very enjoyable game.
39:59Here playing up and playing the game was the quintessential imperial hero that the British
40:04press so desperately needed.
40:09The reports these newspaper correspondents smuggled out of Mafeking kept readers in a
40:14state of agonised suspense.
40:18Would reinforcements arrive before the food ran out?
40:23It was a classic Daily Mail cliffhanger.
40:44At long last, Mafeking was relieved.
40:48And what a relief it was.
40:51Baden-Powell was fated as the latest boys' own paper pinup.
40:58The British public had got their symbolic victory, but it was no test match triumph.
41:03True, Baden-Powell had managed to hold down more than 7,000 Boer troops in the opening
41:08phase of the war.
41:10But the heavy cost in human life of defending Mafeking for so long meant that this was no
41:15imperial game.
41:17And what the British would have to do finally to defeat the Boers would be anything but
41:21cricket.
41:22This war was about to turn dirty.
41:36By the summer of 1900, the tide of the war seemed to be turning.
41:42The British army, under the more decisive leadership of Lord Roberts, Bobs to one and
41:48had marched into Bloemfontein, the capital of the Boers' orange-free state.
41:54This was where Bobs made his headquarters, and this was where his officers came to dance.
42:07When Roberts rode into Bloemfontein, he thought he'd won the war.
42:10But despite the loss of their cities, the Boers refused to surrender.
42:14They simply switched to guerrilla tactics.
42:17In desperation, Roberts adopted a ruthless new strategy designed to hit the Boers where
42:22they were most vulnerable.
42:27The Boers relied on the land for their supplies.
42:31The way to starve them out was to destroy their farms.
42:46The camp was slaughtered, and 30,000 homes were razed to the ground, and the women and
42:51children were herded into camps, concentration camps to be precise.
42:58Nearly 28,000 Boers died in the British camps, more than as a result of direct military action.
43:06The majority of the victims were children.
43:16After a few months of the gay gardens and strip the willow, the Bloemfontein ballroom
43:20floor began to wear rather thin.
43:23To avoid any unfortunate mishaps befalling officers' wives, the old floorboards really
43:28had to be replaced.
43:30Happily, for the accounts of the officers' mess, a use was found for the old ones.
43:36They were sold to the Boer woman to make coffins for their dead children.
43:47In the end, the Boers, deprived of their farms and families and hemmed in by Kitchener's
43:51forces, were forced to the negotiating table.
43:57But the British had to pay a far heavier price for their ruthlessness than the dancers of
44:02Bloemfontein can have foreseen.
44:06After imperial overkill came the backlash.
44:13Buried in this monument to the women and children who died in the British concentration camps
44:17is a middle-class English woman, Emily Hobhouse.
44:21She's a hero here because she brought home the horrors of the concentration camps to
44:25a British public that was fast becoming disillusioned with the war.
44:33The effect of Hobhouse's revelations was explosive.
44:41Their consciences pricked, journalists now rushed to denounce imperialism.
44:50It had been one thing to mow down dusky dervishes, but no respectable newspaper reader wanted
44:55his breakfast spoiled by reports of starving Boer babies.
45:03And in Parliament, a new generation of liberal politicians seized their chance to grill the
45:08government.
45:12A war of annexation against a proud people must be a war of extermination, and that is
45:19unfortunately what we are committing ourselves to, burning homesteads and turning women and
45:26children out of their homes.
45:29The savagery that follows will stain the name of this country.
45:37That was David Lloyd George, the Welsh wizard of the House of Commons and the darling of
45:41the Liberal Party's radical wing.
45:43The horrors of the South African concentration camps presented him with a golden opportunity.
45:49Conservative imperialism wasn't just immoral, according to Lloyd George.
45:53It was also a rip-off, paid for by the massive British voters, but benefiting only a tiny
45:58elite of fat cats, the likes of Rhodes and Rothschild.
46:06This liberal backlash struck a resounding chord with a public raised never to doubt
46:11the Empire's moral superiority.
46:15The upshot in 1906 was one of the biggest election landslides in British history.
46:26Yet for the voters who had turned against rampant imperialism, there was to be no liberal
46:32peace dividend.
46:35For another and more serious threat to the security of the Empire was now unmistakably
46:40hoving into view across the North Sea.
46:52This threat didn't come from troublesome subjects within the Empire.
46:55By a singular irony, it came from the one people whom both Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain
47:01had regarded as the equals of the English-speaking race, the Germans.
47:14Britain's imperial shadow had watched closely as the British overreached themselves in Africa.
47:20Meanwhile, her economy had been overtaking Britain's, and now her army with its Maxim
47:26guns dwarfed Britain's.
47:30And it wasn't over worthless African colonies like Zanzibar that the Germans would mount
47:34their bid for empire.
47:41And what had the British learnt from the debacle in South Africa?
47:46To modernise their army?
47:49To introduce conscription?
47:51To prepare themselves for a bigger challenge?
47:54They'd done none of these things.
48:00Imperial hubris, the arrogance of absolute power, had been and gone.
48:06Rhodes was dead, Chamberlain dying, Baden-Powell reduced to founding the Boy Scouts, a risible
48:11surrogate for a modern land army.
48:14The scramble for Africa, those halcyon days of Maxims against the Matabele, was but a
48:19distant memory.
48:21Africa was the scramble for Europe, now fast approaching, that would determine the fate
48:26of the British Empire.
Recommended
48:20
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