Humanitarian Claims, Imperial Nightmares: The "Refugee" during the Second Anglo-Boer War

Prior to the twentieth century, there was no legal definition of the refugee. The distinction was cultural and, as Shaw argues in her dissertation, it was the product of campaigns waged by would-be refugees and their British supporters. Over the course of the nineteenth century, philanthropists came to apply a standardized set of characteristics to ‘refugee’ crises. Above all, the ‘refugee’ was the victim of foreign retributive violence, violence often indicative of an absence of the rule of law. The horrors of the refugee’s plight made refuge a national imperative constitutive of what it meant for Britain to act as a liberal nation and empire.

The animosities of the 1899-1901 Anglo-Boer War, however, brought the limits of this imperative into sharp relief. As Shaw’s paper will demonstrate, both British and Boer supporters levied critiques of the treatment of Boer and Uitlander ‘refugees’ that challenged the category of refugee itself. Each accused the British government of failing to provide adequately for the war’s innocents, but questioned which group was in fact innocent and deserving of relief. Boer supporters decried the methodic barbarism inflicted through supposed ‘refugee’ relief of Boer women and children detained in concentration camps. Uitlanders (British subjects) asserted that they themselves were the only ‘refugees’ and entitled to the attention showered upon the enemy.

By situating the war in a longer history of refugee relief, Shaw will demonstrate how the welfare of displaced individuals hinged on the critiques set out by colonial subjects, by philanthropists and by on-looking international powers. Furthermore, if the sheltering of refugees once brought the British international renown, explicit in the critiques of the war was a devastating challenge to her colonial rule and philanthropic authority. The moral force once a particularity of British policy would increasingly devolve upon international organizations.