This account of the First Boer War of 1881-1881 shows how the British army was jolted out of its complacency by the effective fire and movement tactics of the Boers and the lethal effects of modern small arms. John Laband demonstrates how the Transvaal rebellion highlighted the problems of imperial overreach in a far-flung empire, and emphasised the many divisive political, ideological, racial, social and economic tensions in nineteenth-century South Africa which prefigured the great crisis of the Boer War of 1899-1902.