Born Then1899–1902
Life during the Second Boer War
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
Britain fought the Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State for the gold fields. To break the guerrilla war the British burned farms and put Boer and Black civilians in separate camps, where disease killed tens of thousands, mostly children.
Deaths: about 22,000 on the British side and 6,000–7,000 Boer fighters; about 26,000 Boer women and children and many thousands of Black Africans died in camps.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Slavery in Brazil 1800–1888
- British emigration to the colonies and America 1815–1913
- Indian indenture system 1834–1917
- German emigration to the Americas 1840–1893
- Chinese emigration from Guangdong and Fujian 1845–1913
- Irish emigration after the Famine 1852–1913
- Third plague pandemic 1855–1930
- French conquest of Vietnam 1858–1887
- Meiji Restoration 1868–1889
- Polish emigration "za chlebem" 1870–1913
- Long Depression 1873–1879
- Reforms of King Chulalongkorn 1874–1910
- Northern Chinese Famine 1876–1879
- Anglo-Zulu War 1879
- Great Italian emigration 1880–1913
- Pogroms in the Russian Empire 1881–1906
- Anglo-Egyptian War and British occupation 1882
- Eruption of Krakatoa 1883
- Third Anglo-Burmese War and annexation 1885–1887
- Atrocities in the Congo Free State 1885–1908
- Great Ethiopian Famine 1888–1892
- African rinderpest epizootic 1888–1897
- 1889–1890 flu pandemic ("Russian flu") 1889–1890
- Russian famine of 1891–1892 1891–1892
- Panic of 1893 1893–1897
- First Sino-Japanese War 1894–1895
- Hamidian massacres 1894–1896
- First Italo-Ethiopian War 1895–1896
- Spanish–American War 1898
- Sixth cholera pandemic 1899–1923