The Great Trek escaped British law and seeded Anglo-Boer racialism

Evidence

28 “The true Vortrekker hated a boundary. When the British Government insisted on fixed boundaries for the Colony and for farms within it, something was taken from him…It was best surely to betake themselves across the border where there were water and free land and no British Government to disallow Vagrancy Laws and where white men could not be haled to court to answer the complaints of their servants” (Ibid., pp. 54–55). “The Great Trek, a movement unique in the history of colonization” (p. 58) “was the defeat of the policy of more intensive settlement. The practice which required the area of an entire Canadian township for the settlement of ten families was extended through all of South Africa. It made for ever impossible the segregation of white and black races in separate areas of settlement…By taking the Boers beyond the reach of British law, the Great Trek enabled them to establish ‘proper’ relations with the native population” (p. 56). “In later years, the Great Trek was to become more than a protest; it was to become a rebellion against the British administration, and the foundation stone of the Anglo-Boer racialism of the twentieth century” (lames, op. cit., p. 28). — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2329

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the main text’s argument that land-based racial separation by the Boers was catalyzed by escaping British jurisdiction — the mechanism of dispersed settlement making segregation impossible is a key causal claim the footnotes document.