Lord Rosebery, the former Liberal prime minister, wrote with some asperity of the “hurricane season” of monument building that followed the Great War. As we stand poised on the brink of a new commemorative deluge marking that conflict's centenary, Peter Donaldson's book is a compelling reminder that it was an earlier war that provided the template for the turning of private grief into public mourning and national mobilization. There is of course great poignancy that within a decade the scale of commemoration had shifted from carefully crafted tributes to neighbors and comrades to emotionally charged remembrance on a mass scale.

Donaldson's work is impressive both in its carefully crafted research and in the clarity of its writing and analysis. It has two further great strengths. The first is its consistent grasp of the nature of the Second Boer War as a transitional conflict, not only in terms of tactics, but also in its impact on the relationship between the army and civil society. With this in mind, the author impressively documents the ways in which the pervasive appeal of popular militarism and the reduction of the distance between the home front and the fighting front helped shape memorialization.

A further achievement is the book's inclusive and systematic coverage. This is important because the sheer scale and variety of Boer War commemoration has frequently been overlooked in the historiography. Donaldson begins with consideration of the most accessible and public of memorials, those raised by local communities and military units. These had more in common than might be assumed. In both cases, memorialization constituted a process rather than a single event and often contained competing notions of belonging and identity. Indeed, there is much fascinating detail on the practical business of financing and organizing monument construction across Britain. The democratization of commemoration is a major theme of this book, and the author ably demonstrates the ways in which this tendency was evident in the depiction of the ordinary fighting soldier, as well as in the increasing pressure faced by the military authorities to take account of civilian sentiments. As in the Great War, aesthetic memorials and traditional idioms predominated, but iconographical symbolism could be controversial, as Lord Kitchener's well-intentioned attempt in 1902 to use recycled Boer bronzes to embellish the Royal Engineer's monument vividly demonstrates. More specific attention to the creation of functional memorials might also have been useful at this point—in Scotland, at least, undertakings like the Queen Victoria School, founded in 1908 as a memorial to the dead of the South African War, were on a significant scale.

Crucially, however, the work goes beyond familiar memorial forms to analyze often more recondite commemorative activity in a range of contexts, including workplaces and places of worship. These chapters contain much that is fresh and original, with significant insights on the malleability of memory and the intersection of self-representation and national identity. Here, too, memorialization was not without tensions. For the public schools, for example, the priority became to restate the ideal of chivalrous and gentlemanly military conduct threatened by the grinding brutality of the guerrilla phase of the war. Monuments to heroic individuals as well as to heroic values also continued to multiply in the first decade of the twentieth century, and even tarnished heroes like Sir Redvers Buller were able to claim their (equestrian) place of honor, buoyed on a wave of local pride. Again anticipating the Great War, the dynamics of grieving at a familial, parish, or workplace level were more searing and intimate, but even in these contexts Donaldson provides powerful evidence that collective identities and national pride in a shared redemptive sacrifice were decisive commemoration.

The author's very comprehensive approach is cemented in the final chapters of the work, which deal with literary and screen representations of the South African War. Appropriately for a war fought in newspaper columns, Donaldson underlines the influence of Leo Amery's Times History of the South African War (1899–1909) in embedding the image of a gentlemanly war, albeit often incompetently conducted, in the popular memory. Indeed, this paradigm survived until the war became subject to the histrionic attentions of the documentary-maker Kenneth Griffiths, whose films from the 1960s onward refashioned the conflict in line with prevailing antiheroic, liberal sensibilities. In short, Peter Donaldson has provided a path-breaking survey. The author should be commended not only for the breadth of his empirical research but also for his willingness to avoid arcane deconstruction techniques in favor of getting to the heart of the practical production and reception of memory.