In response to failures to defeat the guerrillas, British high command ordered scorched earth policies as part of a large scale and multi-pronged counterinsurgency campaign; a network of nets, blockhouses, strongpoints and barbed wire fences was constructed, virtually partitioning the occupied republics.

In the third and final phase, beginning in March 1900 and lasting a further two years, the Boers conducted a hard-fought guerrilla war, attacking British troop columns, telegraph sites, railways, and storage depots.

Boer (meaning "farmer") is the common name for Afrikaans-speaking white South Africans descended from the Dutch East India Company's original settlers at the Cape of Good Hope.

[31] A relative majority represented old Dutch families brought to the Cape during the late 17th and early 18th centuries; however, close to one-fourth of this demographic was of German origin and one-sixth of French Huguenot descent.

The June 1899 negotiations in Bloemfontein failed, and in September 1899 British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain demanded full voting rights and representation for the uitlanders residing in the Transvaal.

The British government of William Ewart Gladstone was unwilling to become mired in a distant war, requiring substantial troop reinforcement and expense, for what was perceived at the time to be a minimal return.

In June 1884, British imperial interests were ignited in the discovery by Jan Gerrit Bantjes of what would prove to be the world's largest deposit of gold-bearing ore at an outcrop on a large ridge some 69 km (43 mi) south of the Boer capital at Pretoria.

A column of 600 armed men was led over the border from Bechuanaland towards Johannesburg by Jameson, the Administrator in Rhodesia of the British South Africa Company, of which Cecil Rhodes was the chairman.

Jan C. Smuts wrote, in 1906: The Jameson Raid was the real declaration of war ... And that is so in spite of the four years of truce that followed ... [the] aggressors consolidated their alliance ... the defenders on the other hand silently and grimly prepared for the inevitable".

In his book The First Boer War, Joseph Lehmann offers this comment: "Employing chiefly the very fine breech-loading Westley Richards – calibre 45; paper cartridge; percussion-cap replaced on the nipple manually—they made it exceedingly dangerous for the British to expose themselves on the skyline".

[52] Cape Colony Governor Sir Alfred Milner; Rhodes; Chamberlain; and mining syndicate owners such as Beit, Barney Barnato, and Lionel Phillips, favoured annexation of the Boer republics.

Sir George Stuart White, commanding the British division at Ladysmith, unwisely allowed Major-General Penn Symons to throw a brigade forward to the coal-mining town of Dundee (also reported as Glencoe), which was surrounded by hills.

Meanwhile, to the north-west at Mafeking, on the border with Transvaal, Colonel Robert Baden-Powell had raised two regiments of local forces amounting to about 1,200 men in order to attack and create diversions if things went amiss further south.

The Boer commanders, Koos de la Rey and Cronjé, had ordered trenches to be dug in an unconventional place to fool the British and to give their riflemen a greater firing range.

Although encountering severe fire, a massed cavalry charge split the Boer defences on 15 February, opening the way for French to enter Kimberley that evening, ending its 124 days' siege.

On 17 February, a pincer movement involving both French's cavalry and the main British force attempted to take the entrenched position, but the frontal attacks were uncoordinated and so were repulsed by the Boers.

From late May 1900, the first successes of the Boer guerrilla strategy were at Lindley (where 500 Yeomanry surrendered), and at Heilbron (where a large convoy and its escort were captured) and other skirmishes resulting in 1,500 British casualties in less than ten days.

As British troops swept the countryside, they systematically destroyed crops, burned homesteads and farms and interned Boer and African men, women, children and workers in concentration camps.

[79] After having conferred with the Transvaal leaders, de Wet returned to the Orange Free State, where he inspired a series of successful attacks and raids in the western part of the country, though he suffered a rare defeat at Bothaville in November 1900.

After defeating British mounted infantry in the Battle of Blood River Poort near Dundee, Botha was forced to withdraw by heavy rains that made movement difficult and crippled his horses.

The political factor was more important than the military: the Cape Dutch, according to Milner 90 percent of whom favoured the rebels, controlled the provincial legislature, and it's authorities forbade the British Army to burn farms or to force Boer civilians into concentration camps.

Other countries such as France, Italy, Ireland (then part of the United Kingdom), and restive areas of the Russian Empire, including Congress Poland and Georgia, also formed smaller volunteer corps.

"[citation needed] At the outset, British officials instructed all white magistrates in the Natal Colony to appeal to Zulu amakhosi (chiefs) to remain neutral, and President Kruger sent emissaries asking them to stay out of it.

This small group of civil servants had a profound effect on the region, eventually leading to the Union of South Africa: In the aftermath of the war, an imperial administration freed from accountability to a domestic electorate set about reconstructing an economy that was by then predicated unambiguously on gold.

On 28 September 1899, Prime Minister Richard Seddon asked Parliament to approve the offer to the imperial government of a contingent of mounted rifles, thus becoming the first British Colony to send troops to the Boer War.

[162] By the time peace was concluded two and a half years later, 10 contingents of volunteers, totalling nearly 6,500 men from New Zealand, with 8,000 horses had fought in the conflict, along with doctors, nurses, veterinary surgeons and a small number of school teachers.

[citation needed] Like the Canadian and particularly the Australian and New Zealand contingents, many of the volunteer units formed by South Africans were "light horse" or mounted infantry, well suited to the countryside and manner of warfare.

[167] Queen Victoria asked F. W. Borden for a photograph of his son, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier praised his services, tributes arrived from across Canada, and in his home town Canning, Nova Scotia, there is a monument (by Hamilton MacCarthy) erected to his memory.

Morant was found guilty along with Peter Handcock and George Witton at their court-martial, with the two former being executed and the latter's sentence commuted, and later released from British prison to return to Australia after sustained public pressure to do so.

[159] The lack of food, water, and sanitary provisions was a feature of 20th-century warfare for both civilians and armed services personnel, yet one consequence of the Boer War and investigative commissions was the implementation of The Hague Convention (1899)[how?]