South Africa’s Indian Ocean: Boer prisoners of war in India

During the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), the British transported Boer prisoners of war to St Helena, Ceylon, India and Bermuda. This article examines the 9000 POWs who were sent to India. Rather than considering them only within the historiography of the South African War (where as failed soldiers they occupy a marginal position), the article places these POWs in the growing Indian Ocean scholarship. This historiography has generated a rich research on forced migration in the Indian Ocean world and the article argues that the Boer POWs can be located within this scholarship. A second strand of Indian Ocean work focuses on the rich transnational experimental imaginings engendered by the epic imperial mobility of the nineteenth century. The ways in which the Boer POWs were (or are) categorised (citizens of the Boer republics, British subjects in the making, imperials citizens, white nationalists, South Africans, etc) can usefully be included in this transnational Indian Ocean historiography.