Editing Industrial Revolution (section)

=== The Boer Wars ===
During the Napoleonic Wars the British gained control of every Dutch colony, and while they handed most of them back afterwards, they decided the Cape Colony in what is now South Africa was too good to let go, so they bought it. [[Rape|The Dutch weren't in a position to refuse the offer]]. A long series of disputes arising from this eventually escalated into a war between the Dutch-descended Boers and the British colonials (the Africans in the region were smart enough to know that they were kinda screwed no matter who won). Both wars were disasters for the British (even though they eventually won the second through overwhelming force) thanks to using Napoleonic tactics in an era of rifled repeating firearms. This was even worse in the first war since the British had not yet ditched their iconic red uniforms. Even after they got wise and switched to khaki, things didn't improve in the early stages of the Second Boer War as Redvers Buller, in charge on behalf of Garnet Wolseley, proved an unmitigated failure, losing battle after battle. After Buller got fired and replaced by Wolseley's rival Frederick Roberts (which caused the British army to basically split in two thanks to tensions between Wolseley's African colonial veterans and Roberts and his Indian troops), the Brits won on the field and the Boers resorted to an insurgency which was brutally suppressed (by which we mean the term "concentration camp" was literally invented here). Adding insult to injury, Roberts replaced Wolseley as Commander-in-Chief after the war.

The Boer Wars have been largely forgotten except by military historians due to their [[The World Wars|foreshadowing of things to come]]. One thing that has survived into the present day is the term "commando", which originally referred to the organization of the Boer forces during the wars and acquired its modern usage due to their unorthodox (for the time) tactics this organization enabled.