Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner

Alfred Milner was a British imperial administrator and politician whose career was closely associated with southern Africa and the consolidation of imperial power at the turn of the twentieth century. As High Commissioner for Southern Africa and governor of the Cape Colony, he became a leading advocate of a harder British line toward the South African Republic before the Second Boer War.

As High Commissioner for Southern Africa, Milner pressed the dispute over the political rights of British immigrants in the Transvaal and rejected compromises that might have avoided war. He supervised British policy during the conflict and the reconstruction of the conquered Boer republics.

Thomas Pakenham’s The Boer War reconstructs the conflict that began in October 1899 when the South African Republic and the Orange Free State declared war on Britain. He follows the political confrontation between Paul Kruger, Alfred Milner and Joseph Chamberlain, the influence of the Transvaal goldfields, and the early campaigns in Natal and the Cape. Boer victories, the sieges of Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking, and the costly British attempts to relieve them expose how badly imperial confidence had misjudged a mobile enemy fighting on familiar ground.