The Cause of the Boers in Their Struggle Against the British Had Been the Subject of An

Theodor Mommsen, British Imperialism and the South African War of Independence (1899-1902)

The cause of the Afrikaners in their struggle against the British in the South African War of Independence (1899-1902), more widely known as the Boer War, was the subject of an extensive debate among historians of imperialism, including the famous German historian, Theodore Mommsen, in the first years of the twentieth century. In 1902, Mommsen was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature at the age of 86. This celebrated event coincided with the bitter conclusion of the Boer War as a result of Kitchener's use of concentration camps for Afrikaner women and children to isolate their guerrillas, and also with the death of Cecil John Rhodes, whose aggressive promotion of British Imperialism and land acquisition in Southern Africa had been largely responsible for the conflict. Rhodes had become something of a cult figure in Germany and he was later to become a model leader for prominent Nazis, including Goebbels and even Hitler himself. As an ancient historian, Mommsen could scarcely have avoided the notion of imperialism, and his views on contemporary empires, such as the British one, was widely sought after in Germany and in South Africa, where contacts with German intellectuals, including Classicists, was gaining momentum and would later lead to significant scholarly exchanges. Mommsen is generally viewed by British Classicists as a supporter of Caesar and as a critic of Cicero's republicanism as it was practiced in Rome in the first century before our era. At the same time, however, Mommsen greatly admired Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and he was otherwise politically liberal and an admirer of the achievements of the English parliamentary government. Despite this, he argued that British empire-building in South Africa went beyond the needs of the British nation and by overreaching itself it would bring about its fall, just as Rome had by her relentless acquisition of the territories of the Mediterranean from England to Iraq. Mommsen's critique did not go unanswered, however. The distinguished Classicist Adolf Sonnenschein, the Professor of Classics in Birmingham, joined the Oxford Indologist, Max Müller, in rebutting his views. Both Müller and Sonnenschein were of German extraction but they had forged highly successful careers in England. So high did feelings run during this debate that, when the British navy intercepted three German ships on suspicion of gun-running and escorted them into Durban harbour for inspection, public opinion in Germany was outraged. However, Mommsen's opposition to imperialism in his own day was inevitably doomed to failure. The German public failed to appreciate his Anglophile sentiments, while his criticisms of British imperialism in South Africa alienated his friends in England. This paper analyses the use of the Roman Empire and Roman imperialism as an exemplum in this important debate, as it was carried out in the British, German, and South African newspapers of the day.