AHC: Prevent the Second Boer War

Anyone want to take a crack? Also don't just delay it to a further date, is it possible to have lasting peace between the boers and brits?
 
here is a crazy idea have the Boers realize that the British will come back and will eventually win, deciding that their survival as an independent nation is impossible so they ask the United States to annex them (seeing this as a better option then conquest by Britain). the Brits would not be happy but I do not think they would invade the new American state in southern Africa
 
No Jameson Raid and Rhodes dies 7 years early. In the chaos of his death, the Boer Republics manage to secure more of the Witwatersrand mining revenue.
 
I thought most of the tension between the Boers and Brits were about the Uitlanders? Say if somehow the Boers and Brits find an agreement, could a future war be avoided?

The 'concern' over the uitlanders was just a pretext to invade and seize the gold and diamond mines directly. The Brits were willing to leave the Boers alone after the first Boer War, because they didn't have anything the British wanted, I guarantee you that if the British knew what was under the ground then they wouldn't have let them declare independence in the first place.
 
I thought most of the tension between the Boers and Brits were about the Uitlanders? Say if somehow the Boers and Brits find an agreement, could a future war be avoided?
the Uitlanders were there for the gold. No gold (or discovery of) means no (or few) Uitlanders. Brits want the gold. Boers want control of their country, which is going to be impossible being inundated with outsiders.

No war is inevitable, IMO, but with two diametrically opposed forces at work, it is going to be very difficult to avoid this one. It's been awhile since I've read on the topic, but I seem to recall Rhodes was a major player in British empire building in the region. There's no stopping mineral barons from exploiting a gold rush, but perhaps bumping off Rhodes as early as the POD allows for altering circumstances so that the conflict can be resolved in a less explosive manner.
 
here is a crazy idea have the Boers realize that the British will come back and will eventually win, deciding that their survival as an independent nation is impossible so they ask the United States to annex them (seeing this as a better option then conquest by Britain). the Brits would not be happy but I do not think they would invade the new American state in southern Africa

I'm not sure the US would accept -- the US didn't really have the power-projection to defend them (and even if they did, the Boer republics were completely landlocked, so good job getting reinforcements to them...), South Africa had no strategic value for them, and even if the Brits didn't invade the new states it would still sour relations between the two countries, whereas IOTL this was a period of increasing diplomatic and cultural closeness between the two nations. I'm also not sure why the Boers would see annexation by the US as preferable to annexation by the UK, since Britain during this period was happy to grant its (white) colonies a large measure of self-governance.

If anything, the Boers would be more likely to try and negotiate some sort of protectorate status with Britain, where they give British companies mining rights in exchange for the Brits keeping the soldiers away, or something along those lines. Not that this would be particularly likely, either.
 
Maybe delay the discovery of minerals till WW1 has already broken out/is just about to break out. Britain is initially too preoccupied with the war to spare troops for South Africa, and after the war has no stomach to start new conflicts in the immediate future, even against a small and far-away place like the Transvaal. Plus naked displays of imperialism went out of fashion after WW2, so any attempt to annexe the Boers would provoke more international outcry than it historically did. The combination of war-weariness, fear of bad press, and status quo bias means that the UK ends up never launching an invasion of the Boer states.
 
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