The Boer War, by Denis Judd and Keith Surridge

The great game that exposed the dirty work of our Empire

The Boer War, which ended just a century ago, was fought to win what Sir Alfred Milner called the "great game between ourselves and the Transvaal for the mastery of South Africa". Victory seemed all the more urgent because the balance of power had been tilted towards the Afrikaners by enough Rand gold to beggar King Solomon's Mines. All the same, the contest could hardly have been less even. An industrial giant ruling an empire on which the sun never set confronted two tiny republics whose leader, Paul Kruger, once assured the round-the-world sailor Joshua Slocum that the earth was flat.

Everything about the Boers was "of the 17th century", wrote Conan Doyle, "except their rifles". With these imported Mausers, superior to British Lee-Metfords, they gave John Bull the greatest shock since the Indian Mutiny, perhaps the American Revolution. Stumbling into the disasters of "Black Week", Britain's army again proved to be, as a doctor besieged in Ladysmith wrote, "lions led by asses".

In due course it managed to occupy the Orange Free State and Transvaal, relieving Mafeking and provoking hysterical joy. But Kitchener never crushed guerrilla resistance, even by employing what Liberals denounced as "methods of barbarism" – farm burnings and concentration camps. The negotiated peace resulted in a draw: British supremacy was established but independent Afrikanerdom survived. The only clear losers were the non-whites.

Denis Judd and Keith Surridge recapitulate this familiar story with enviable efficiency. Their book is not as exciting as Thomas Pakenham's classic, nor as well written (it is full of sentences worthy of Geoff Hoon, such as "The government now moved swiftly to address the rapidly deteriorating situation"). But it is better balanced and more discriminating. Its great strength lies in the analysis of "the ambivalences of war".

They show that the Boers were far from the homogeneous farming Volk of legend. Many were landless sharecroppers; 5,000 fought for the British, while 2,000 foreigners, including two brigades of Irishmen, fought for them. And though Afrikaners despised and maltreated Africans, they often adopted their remedies – cow-dung poultices for skin diseases, lice for jaundice, and crushed bugs for convulsions.

The British were also divided. Empire loyalists rallied to the cause and thousands of Africans took part in the "white man's war". But at home pro-Boers were vociferous, sometimes odiously so. The old Etonian socialist Henry Hyndman saw the war as part of a conspiracy to plant "an Anglo-Hebraic Empire in Africa". Its capital, anti-Semites said, would be "Jewhannesburg".

Judd and Surridge also dissect claims that this was "the last of the gentlemen's wars". There were instances of chivalry, as when the Boers fired a shell into Ladysmith full of Christmas pudding. In general, though, it was a brutal slogging-match punctuated by atrocities. Kipling hoped it would "teach us no end of a lesson", and Edwardians did try to increase national efficiency.

But the war was most instructive in undermining confidence in Britain's imperial destiny. Its lesson was not that of Kipling but of Orwell: it enabled so many imperialists to see what he called "the dirty work of the empire" at close quarters.