There aren't many times in military history where rifle shooting has been as important as it was during the Second Anglo-Boer War at the turn of the 20th century. The British Empire's juggernaut was stopped in its tracks (at least temporarily) by the Boer burghers' ("citizens") skill with long-range shooting, which astounded onlookers all around the world. Quite a few of the burghers were also armed with an unusual variety of obsolete weaponry, while the majority of the unpaid Boer militiamen, operating in small mounted formations ("commandos"), were equipped with the most contemporary repeating bolt-action rifles and firing smokeless powder cartridges. It is necessary to briefly discuss the origins of the conflict and provide a very broad overview of the war's development in order to put these weapons into perspective. The Boers (also known as "farmers") were strict, devout Calvinists who could trace their ancestry to a colony of Dutch (and later, French Huguenot) settlers who arrived at the southern tip of Africa in the 17th century to restock Dutch ships traveling to and from the Dutch East Indies. During the Napoleonic Wars, the British took control of the Cape Colony, which was called after the Cape of Good Hope. Soon after, tensions between the British and the fiercely independent Boers increased. In order to live their lives as they saw fit, groups of Boers were travelling northward into the interior of Africa by ox-drawn wagon trains by the 1830s and 1840s. This was similar to what was happening in the American West at the same time. They eventually formed two independent republics-the Orange Free State and the Transvaal (also known by its official title of the South African Republic)-after subduing hostile native tribes, putting them finally (or so they believed) beyond the reach of the British. But during the Victorian era, British imperialism was in full swing, and the British kept seizing more country from the Boers. In fact, in 1880, they briefly an

Around 1880, a number of coastal enclaves and communities had been established by European settlers in Algeria's far north and the Cape's extreme south. Up until that moment, powerful African nations and deadly tropical diseases against which Europeans lacked enough antibodies had kept them out of the majority of interior Africa. The majority of Africans were free to live in separate societies, which might be either dispersed "stateless" groupings or highly organized kingdoms. This drastically changed between around 1880 and 1914, when European countries, in a process known as "the Scramble for Africa," captured all of Africa with the exception of Ethiopia, which resisted Italian invasion, and Liberia, which was a settlement of freed American slaves. On the European side, crucial elements that aided this process included intense racism, nationalistic rivalry, and modern magazine-fed rifles and machine guns' higher firepower. The European countries did not compete with one another over territories in Africa because they had planned the conquest at the Berlin Conference in 1884. African kings and queens reacted differently to the European invasion because they did not see it as a common danger. Some sided with the invaders while others resisted. While privately owned chartered firms with commercial interests in a particular region frequently achieved the initial colonial conquest, financial issues meant that the different European governments took over the colonies within a few years. . Many theories have attempted to explain this dramatic conquest over the years. These theories include Hobson 1902, which links it to the rise of avaricious ultra-rich businessmen; Lenin 1963; Robinson and Gallagher 1961; Robinson and Gallagher 1962; Hopkins 1973; and Lenin 1963. When significant minerals were discovered in Southern Africa-diamonds in the late 1860s and gold in the 1880s-the British felt the need to secure the interior. This led to a succession of battles and the fi