This chapter begins with an update! Originally, it was added to a more. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 info Thank you for the reward from the remnants of the Ming Dynasty. Unexpectedly, he rewarded again. I'm lazy.,It's usually released automatically.,Just add a week directly.,Add one more every day.,That's three updates a day this week.。

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The Boer War was a war that was destined to happen because the contradictions between the Boers, the white European descendants of South Africa, and the British Empire, South Africa's colonial power, were too deep.

Needless to say, the Boers are the descendants of the Dutch colony in Cape Town, but after the British took the Cape Town colony from the Dutch, the Boers began to move to the interior of South Africa, they established farms in the interior of South Africa, and lived a simple life of agriculture and animal husbandry.

But if that's all there is to it, they won't go to war with the British, and they won't even break away from British rule.

As if immortal, the Boers discovered abundant reserves of diamonds and gold during their migration.

The discovery of diamonds led to the First Boer War, and in 1867, diamonds were discovered in the Orange River area. The Boers established Orange and immediately declared the area under their own jurisdiction. The British colonists vigorously opposed and conspired to annex the two Boer republics. In 1877, the British annexed the Transvaal Republic, also established by the Boers, an act that provoked a Boer revolt. In February 1881, the Boer army defeated more than 1,000 British troops near Mount Mazuba, forcing the British to recognize the independence of the Transvaal and sign a peace treaty with each other, under the pretext of retaining some power.

Diamonds are a luxury, and they cannot be snatched by the British Empire at all costs.

But then the Boers discovered gold, although gold did not have the unit price of diamonds before, but it was of great significance, in the era of the gold standard, gold was the guarantee of financial hegemony, and the British Empire, as the world's financial center, greedy for gold, almost an instinct, the discovery of gold once again caused disputes between the Boers and the British.

In 1886, in the Johannesburg region of central South Africa, a young Australian named George Harrison discovered the world's largest gold mine by chance. The mining area is centered on the city of Johannesburg and expands to the southeast and southwest flanks, forming a gold arc belt about 500 kilometers long, accounting for about 1/4 of the world's gold reserves. This momentous discovery spurred thousands of European colonists into an influx. Over the next four years, the colonists organized 141 mining companies to frantically mine the region's diamonds and gold for high profits.

Historically, the Boers did not accept British rule, otherwise they would not have been able to move from the coast to the interior step by step, and the road through the interior was a road of blood and tears for the blacks, and the same was true for the Boers, they could not easily take away the land of the blacks, so the homeland they opened up was bloody.

Previously, they faced strong pressure from the black kingdom and the Zulu kingdom, so they were still able to submit to the British and accept British protection, but the British were also promoting colonial expansion, and the Zulu kingdom was wiped out a few years ago, and now the Boers have not only lifted the threat, but also made a windfall, and their ambitions have swelled again.

As they moved inland from the port of Cape Town, the farther away the Boers were from the British, the farther they were from the sea, and the Boers had been trying to open a road to the coast, so they continued to expand eastward, to grab land from the blacks, to have a coast of their own.

The British did not want to see the Boers become a country with a coastline, so they always preemptively signed protection agreements with the black kingdoms, or gave them support, cutting off the insatiable claws of the Boers. The British formed a vast network of sieges around the Boers, and around the Boers were a number of black forces armed with British weapons, including a black kingdom armed with rifles provided by the British, troops trained by the British, and the Christianity spread by the British.

After the Zulu kingdom was wiped out by the British themselves, the Boers once again intended to expand. At this time, they discovered a huge gold mine, and the economic benefits of gold mining were beyond imagination, and the Boer Transvaal government could get a million pounds in taxes just from the import of mining machinery, household goods, etc., and they could also get a dividend of 600,000 pounds through monopoly concessions.

The huge golden dividend has greatly increased the purchasing power of the Boers, and they can import weapons and strengthen armaments.

At the same time, the Boers also vigorously excluded the interests of the British expatriate, and the Transvaal government imposed heavy taxes on foreign funds, and in terms of fiscal expenditure, the Transvaal government allocated only £650 to expatriate schools out of the 63,000 pounds a year on education. Johannesburg's civic construction was in tatters, with no water and water systems, no lighting, police corruption, a whole city of filth, disease, and the golden dividends were all used to build the Boer city of Pretoria, making the city clean and beautiful to rival that of Europe.

In 1890, the Transvaal Government reaffirmed that foreign nationals residing in Johannesburg, although required to pay full taxes, had no right to stand for election to the presidency and the Legislative Council unless they had resided in the Transvaal for a period of fourteen years and had become naturalized. In addition, all aliens are not allowed to hold government office, and their children, whether English, Protestant, Jewish, or Catholic, can attend government-funded schools.

To put it bluntly, the Boer government implemented a policy of immigration discrimination, but the degree was obviously much less than that of the American anti-Chinese, but how could the British accept such discrimination, and the British diaspora continued to lobby the government to crack down on the Boers. The British capitalists used this as a pretext to encourage the government to annex the Boer state.

But the mere exclusion of the British expatriates by the Boers in terms of fiscal expenditure and suffrage obviously did not make the British determined to destroy the country, because the British government only valued the gold of South Africa, but it was mined by British companies, and they could not use force.

What really made the British government determined to fight the Boers was German intervention.

Germany was invited by the Boers, and of course they themselves wanted to come, and during the Bismarck period, Germany had considerable interests in Africa, and between 1879 and 1883, German exports to Africa increased from 279,200 to 422,800 marks, while imports of African goods from the port of Hamburg alone soared from 5,196,500 to 9,105,200 marks during the same period. Although it was a deficit, it was mainly manufactured goods that were exported to Africa and raw materials that were imported, and this trade was clearly beneficial to Germany.

Most importantly, the largest commodity exported to Africa is spirits, which are the backbone of the Junkers estate in 48% of German exports to Africa, and the German spirits operators are all Junkers landlords, who in turn are the ruling class of Germany. Therefore, Germany had a strong tendency to occupy the African colonies.

Southwest Africa and Southeast Africa, which had not yet been partitioned by the Great Powers, became German colonies, and Germany always wanted to connect the colonies of Southeast Africa and Southwest Africa into one, and between the two colonies was the homeland of the Boers, so as early as the Bismarck era, organizations such as the German Colonization Promotion Association were agitating the government to establish colonies on the land of the Boers.

As a result, the Boers, having made their fortunes, intended to establish a powerful Boer empire in Africa, hoping to create a Greater South African Boer Federation "from the Cape of Good Hope to the Zambezi River", and their ambitions were supported by Germany.

The Boers gave concessions for the construction of three sections of the railway from the British-controlled seaport to the Transvaal Republic, backed by German capital, to the Dutch-South African Railway Company, which was backed by German capital, and excluded British capital from intervening. Then, in 1893 and 1895, the Transvaal government, with German funding, built a railway from Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal Republic, to the Portuguese territory of Port Dragos, freeing the Boers from the previous constraints of having to transport goods through the Cape Town railway and port. And this railway was also connected to Germany's East African colonies.

The reason why the Boers are close to Germany is mainly due to cultural factors, the Boers are the descendants of the Dutch colonists, and Dutch and German are basically the same language and can be communicated. Therefore, they naturally became close to the increasingly powerful Germany and pinned their hopes for independence on Germany.

The reason why the Germans supported the Boers was that they hoped to unite the African colonies of East and West Germany through the Boer state, but also that they could not refuse the golden interests of the Boers.

In the development of gold in Johannesburg, not only the Boers, but also the British, but also the Germans, perhaps even more than the British.

Before the outbreak of the war, Germany exported goods worth more than 10 million pounds to the Boers every year, and the prospects were very good, in 1886, the value of goods imported from Germany to the Transvaal was 300,000 pounds, and after 1895, the value of goods exported to the Transvaal reached 12 million pounds per year, an increase of 39 times, and it can be said that Germany has controlled almost all of the Transvaal's export trade.

Germany also controlled the Boer financial system, and after the discovery of the world's richest gold mines in the Transvaal, Rhodes, the British colonist who ran the South African Diamond Mining Company, took the lead and established the "Unified Gold Mining Company of South Africa" in 1887, and German capital penetrated into the Boer financial system, and the William Knappe Bank in Berlin manipulated the Transvaal National Bank.

In addition, there are quite a lot of German immigrants in the Boer countries, with nearly 15,000 German immigrants in Johannesburg, and the clubs that contact German immigrants are spread throughout the Transvaal, and the number of German immigrants entering the Boer countries every year far exceeds that of British immigrants.

It can be said that sooner or later the Boer state would have become a German colony, or at least an ally of Germany in Africa, if the British had not taken practical measures. This is absolutely unacceptable to the UK.

Britain has always had colonies in Africa that run from north to south, so it must also pass through the Boer homeland, through the British encroachment step by step, before the war, Britain had surrounded the Boer Republic from the west, north and south.

Under these circumstances, Britain could not tolerate the possibility of Germany controlling the Boer state by rail, so when the railway was opened, Britain also made up its mind to annex the Boer state.

However, this war is not as simple as it seems on the surface, it is not just a war between the Red and German wars for gold, in fact, it is also a game between the two great empires of Britain and Germany.

In June 1899, under the pretext of the Transvaal's refusal to grant citizenship to the British, Britain put pressure on the Boers by massing troops on its borders and sending reinforcements from within the country.

The Boers did not take the British threat seriously, because they had clashed with the British once four years earlier, and on that occasion they had won a big victory over the British.

In December 1895, the British mining magnate Rhodes instigated his friend, Dr. Jensen, a senior employee of the South African Company, to lead 500 South African company policemen, armed with several machine guns, on an expedition to the Transvaal with the intention of overthrowing Boer President Kruger. As a result, Jensen and his party entered the Transvaal and were led by the nose by the Boers, circled between the peaks and hills near Johannesburg, and three days later were surrounded by Boer police forces, killing 134 people and taking prisoners all the rest, including Jensen.

The Boers fined each captive £25,000, and Kruger used the hefty fine of £212,000 to build two huge armoured batteries in Johannesburg, where the expatriates were most concentrated, and sent bills for the forts to the British government, claiming that it was a fine for "moral and moral damage" to the British.

The last victory made the Boers full of confidence, and they believed that they were well armed and equipped and would not lose to Britain at all, so not only did they not accept the British threat, but also issued an ultimatum to Britain-for-tat, demanding that Britain stop increasing its troops in South Africa, withdraw all troops that had reached South Africa, and submit all disputed issues to diplomatic arbitration with a deadline of 48 hours for reply.

After the British refusal, the federal parliaments of the Boer states of the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State declared war on the British Empire, and the Boer general Delarey immediately attacked, intercepting a British armoured train on the Western Cape Railway in British Bechuanaland.

The Boer War finally broke out.