The Brits knew exactly what they were doing. They were told numerous times and did nothing to improve the camps - in fact the situation rapidly deteriorated.
As it was 29,000 women and children died (1 in 4). Had the Boer armies held out another year or 2, very few women and children (if any) would have survived.
The Brits (then) were every bit the rat bastards the German Nazis and Soviets were..
So the Ruskies weren't 1st as the article suggests. Let's give credit where credit is due and pin 1st prize on the Brits.
I still don’t think the Brits were going for purposeful extermination. The military commanders just didn’t care what happened to the people initially and were ill-prepared to keep them. It was an expedient of war. The main reason the Boer army didn’t hold out another year or two was because of the camps, since they couldn’t stand to see their people suffering. But the government did try to fix things once the British people found out what was going on, although it pretty much failed.
What the British did was bad, but it’s still not in the same class as Stalin and Hitler, who both made camps purposely designed to kill by starvation, disease, and just plain execution.
If you want an earlier precedent to the British, you could probably look at what we did to the Indians in the 1800s. Go back to the 1600s and the Puritans stuck 500 Christian Indians who had allegiance to the English on the barren Deer Island in New England during Winter without food or shelter. More than half died. It would have been more, except a bunch of the “Praying Indian” towns took off when they heard of their impending internment.
We did almost exactly the same thing centuries later to the Japanese in WWII, although with far fewer casualties.