9

CECIL RHODES

Entrepreneur-imperialist

At around half past nine on Sunday, 29 December 1895, the magistrate of Mafeking was sitting peacefully on his stoep in the warmth of the dark evening having just enjoyed the evening church service with his wife and his mother. Around them was a town that was not much to speak of. A few homes, a station, a hospital, a prison, a convent, a library, a court-house and a branch of Standard Bank were all that made up the capital of Britain’s Crown Colony of Bechuanaland, through which ran the road to the Boer-ruled South African Republic of the Transvaal – the world’s greatest gold state and soon to be home to more direct British investment than anywhere else on earth.*1

Suddenly, through the darkness, loud cheering echoed from the police camp round the corner. Men of the recently disbanded Bechuanaland Border Police were saddling up to march along the dusty road to Pitsani to rendezvous with one of the most remarkable men in the British Empire: Dr Leander Starr Jameson.*2 A Scot with a lightning-quick mind, Jameson was about to lead an adventure that would earn him immortality as the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’.1 After issuing his orders, and offering a toast, Jameson set off to lead his men to storm the Boer capital: Johannesburg.

The ‘Jameson Raid’ had been conceived over months of growing frustration. For years, the charismatic entrepreneur-imperialist Cecil Rhodes, the British Empire’s richest man and now Prime Minister of Britain’s Cape Colony, had dreamed of a united Federation of South Africa, a ‘United States of South Africa’.2 But one thing stood in his way. The seventy-six-year-old President of the South African Republic, Paul Kruger, resisted every effort Rhodes made to inch together the Cape Colony and the Boer republic. After four years of arguing, Rhodes’s patience was running out. And so he prepared for violence.

Jameson had readied his men, armed with the latest Maxim machine guns, in utmost secrecy. A convenient strip of border land was secured from the London government, allegedly for a railway, on which to marshal them. A communications centre was created in Rhodes’s Cape Town company offices. Plans were drawn up to smuggle 5,000 rifles and a million rounds of ammunition, hidden in oil barrels and coal trucks, to pro-British rebels in Johannesburg, where Rhodes’s brother Frank was dispatched to foment rebellion. Finally, a pretext for invasion was prepared in the shape of a forged letter of invitation from the English leaders of Johannesburg’s community of ‘alien’ British workers, calling on Jameson for armed help to protect ‘thousands of unarmed men, women and children... at the mercy of well-armed Boers’.3

Yet, on that fateful Sunday evening, as his troops were mustered, Rhodes was unwinding in blissful ignorance in his sprawling Dutch-style farmhouse, ‘Groote Schuur.’ Suddenly alarmed that a key part of his plan – the armed British uprising in Johannesburg – was not quite primed and ready, Rhodes had that morning ordered Jameson to stand down. But Jameson’s men had cut the telegraph wires. The message to them did not get through. And so, on that Sunday evening Jameson marched off into disaster.

It was a week before news of a catastrophe began to arrive in London. ‘Trouble in the Transvaal’ screamed the headlines, late on 6 January 1896, and beneath the headlines ran a sorry saga. Around 500 of the former Bechuanaland Border Police, along with mounted officers from Matabeleland and Mashonaland,*3 had crossed the border with eight Maxims and three field guns on their march to Johannesburg, led by the Earl of Coventry’s second son, Major Coventry. After two days, shots were exchanged with Boer commandos 20 miles from Krugersdorp. The Boers fell back, but only to lure Jameson into a trap at Doornkop, where 4,000 Boers equipped with ample supplies of ammunition lay in wait. In a six-and-a-half-hour pitched battle, Jameson’s force fought ‘from 5am to 11.30 though cold and rain, starved and thirsty, till the ammunition failed and the Maxims got jammed for want of water to keep them cool’.4 Major Coventry was among those who lay dead on the battlefield.

With the day lost, Jameson ordered a torn white shirt be hoisted in surrender. In Johannesburg, his allies, the rebels of the ‘reform committee’, capitulated. In London, Rhodes’s key political ally, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, rapidly – if mendaciously – protested ignorance of the raid. In the Cape Colony, Rhodes could not pretend to offer the same excuse.

Cecil Rhodes – Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, Chairman of the British South Africa Company, founder of the De Beers diamond company and the single most powerful entrepreneur in the British Empire – had fallen. He was thirty-eight.

*

Cecil Rhodes was born in the vicarage on South Street, in the thriving Hertfordshire market town of Bishop’s Stortford, to a devoted mother and a diffident father in the early evening of 5 July 1853, after a wet fortnight had soaked the hay harvest.5 His mother, Louisa, was descended from a family of well-to-do Lincolnshire bankers.6 His father, Francis, in appearance tall and spare, enjoyed an education at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, before departing from the family’s trading traditions and joining the Church of England.*4 It was the Church that eventually dispatched him to the living at St Michael’s, Bishop’s Stortford, where he lived on top of the hill, above the Corn Exchange. The town was rich in public houses, but its school was very poor, and it was to this challenge that Reverend Rhodes applied himself.

By all accounts, it was a happy home. Cecil’s mother, a pleasant, plump woman with a cheerful nature, set the tenor, and while Cecil’s relations with Francis were cool, Louisa adored her son. She called no one else, in her letters at least, ‘my darling’. ‘She was never flustered,’ Rhodes later wrote, ‘and seemed always to have ample time to listen to all our many and, to us, vastly important affairs.’7 She remained a close confidante to Cecil for the rest of her life. The Reverend Francis Rhodes, by contrast, aged forty-six when Cecil was born, offered his son more instruction than warmth.8 Cecil Rhodes later recalled that his father ‘frequently, and I am now sure wisely, demolished many of my dreams as fantastical, but when I had rebuilt them on more practical lines, he was ready to listen.’9

Unlike his older brothers, Cecil was sent (in 1861) not to Eton or Winchester but to the local grammar school, where he proved a tough, thoughtful, attractive child, but only an average student, with a propensity for manipulation and a fiercely competitive streak. One teacher well remembered a game of cricket when Cecil took a hard ball to the arm. ‘I was struck’, said the teacher, ‘by the Spartan way, almost indifference with which the child bore pain.’10

At the age of thirteen, Rhodes chose himself a motto, ‘to do or to die’, and his habit of carefully weighing decisions earned him a nickname from his brother Frank, ‘Long-headed Cecil’.11 Academic prizes, however, never followed, and while he won a school silver medal for elocution, his Latin and Greek were poor, and a place at Oxford University eluded him.12 Uninspired by the Church or the army, which employed all four of his brothers, Rhodes took aim at a career at the bar. ‘I still above everything would like to be a barrister,’ he wrote in an early letter to his Aunt Sophy, ‘but I agree with you it is a very precarious profession. Next to that I think a clergyman’s life is the nicest’.13

But Rhodes would never train either as a lawyer or a clergyman. Early in 1869, he began to suffer unexplained heart pains and a shortness of breath. His symptoms were diagnosed, incorrectly, as consumption, and his doctor recommended a long sea voyage and a change of climate. On this misdiagnosis his fortune turned. For not only had Rhodes’s risk-loving eldest brother, Herbert, just departed – with impeccable timing – to southern Africa, but Aunt Sophy was a very rich woman; now she, worried for Cecil’s health, offered her nephew £2,000 (between £1 million and £1.7 million in today’s money) to follow his brother. Rhodes set off for the British Colony of Natal to join Herbert, who had set himself up in cotton farming.

Among the many ships that arrived at Gravesend on 25 March 1870, from all over the world, was the old wooden barque, the Eudora, which drew in from Natal for a quick turnaround. When she headed back out to sea, just a few days later, Cecil Rhodes was on board. Over the course of the next seventy-five days, he recovered his health, studied maps of his future home and began to dream. ‘They will tell you that I came on account of my health or from a love of adventure,’ said Rhodes later in life, ‘and to some extent that may be true. But the real fact is that I could no longer stand cold mutton.’14

On 1 September 1870, the Eudora anchored in the roads off the Bluff, the promontory at Durban, and the tall, lanky, anaemic fair-headed seventeen-year-old was ferried across the sandbar to the harbour. Blinking in the bright afternoon sun, he scanned the quayside for his brother – but no brother could be seen.15 Rather, there were just two letters. The first, from Herbert, explained his departure north to the diamond fields of Griqualand West, around Kimberley, and enclosed £20 to help Cecil get his start in cotton growing. The second was from Dr Sutherland, the Surveyor-General of Natal, who invited him round for tea. Rhodes took up Sutherland on his offer, and, after a tour of the surrounding countryside, was invited to stay, until Herbert’s return.16 When Herbert arrived, the two brothers set off for the Umkomanzi Valley, just south of Pietermaritzburg, there to commence what would turn out to be a disastrous foray into farming.

‘Nothing can exceed the beauty of the valley we are in,’ Rhodes wrote on 18 October 1870, in one of his first letters back to his mother, ‘the hills are for hundreds of feet all round us, their sides covered both with bush and tropical vegetation.’17 But it was not long before he had to admit that cotton was a difficult business; ‘It really seems an ill-fated valley,’ Rhodes wrote to his mother. ‘You would be surprised if I told you what a sink it has been.’18 Herbert had planted his cotton rows too close together. The crop failed, and Rhodes was left with nothing to show from an entire year’s work. A second year of modest improvements followed, and Rhodes was now learning the vital business of managing labourers, rubbing along with officials and getting to know his fellow traders; but his cotton sold for a poor price, and once again he turned no profit for the year. And so, Cecil Rhodes began to survey the options opening up 400 miles away, across the Drakensberg Mountains, in the astonishing new diamond fields on the western edge of the Orange Free State.

Herbert Rhodes had already left in May 1871 to stake a claim. Cecil now decided to join him. And so, thirteen months after he set foot in southern Africa, Rhodes loaded up his ox-cart for the month-long trek past the Mooi river and across the Tugela, up through Van Reenan’s Pass and on to the high veldt, through Boer villages, to Kimberley, the town which had become – in the words of Anthony Trollope – ‘the most remarkable sight on the face of the earth’.19

*

Cecil Rhodes was not alone in his odyssey. Indeed, he and Herbert were but two of the extraordinary 4,250,000 people who left the British Isles in the last forty years of the nineteenth century, transforming Britain’s global footprint – and trade balance. Between 1815 and 1874, Britain extended its formal imperial control worldwide – across western Australia, New Zealand, western Canada, India, the Colony of Natal, the Gold Coast and Lagos, and Fiji – and Britons quickly travelled to fill the new spaces.*5 Unlike most of the Irish and the Scots expatriates, who headed to America, 60 per cent of English colonialists –100,000 a year – headed to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa.20 In all, 8 million Britons left between 1853 and 1920.

Some travelled for high purpose. The China Inland Mission and Church Missionary Society, along with other similar organizations, had recruited 8,500 missionaries. Others served the new machineries of state: by the 1890s, the Indian Civil Service and the Colonial Service employed 20,000 administrators and 146,000 soldiers. Most, however, such as Cecil and Herbert Rhodes, were simply looking for a new life in a new world that was suddenly smaller, thanks to the extraordinary advances in Britain’s capital markets and communication methods: fast steamships, global telegraph links and new railway lines now allowed entrepreneurs to move people and money all over the world. When Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s first transatlantic steamship, the SS Great Western, sailed from New York to Bristol in 1838, it slashed the crossing to just fourteen days and twelve hours. It was the first in a gallery of engineering masterpieces, culminating in the gigantic 700-foot SS Great Eastern, designed to carry 4,000 passengers and enough fuel for the journey to the Far East and back.*6

A mobile, well-connected emigrant population was hugely good for British business. In the decades after 1860, multilateral trade increased ten-fold, for where the British went, exports followed.21 In the words of Arnold White, ‘The constant travelling of the Colonialists backwards and forwards to England makes it absurd to speak of the colonies as if they were a foreign land. They are simply pieces of Britain distributed about the world.’22 Whereas, in 1815, the ‘settlement empire’ consumed just 20 per cent of Britain’s ‘visible’ or physical exports, from the 1850s the figure rose to 50 per cent.23 By the 1870s, a third of all exports – both physical goods and services such as insurance or banking – were bought by imperial markets, which became, by the end of the century, the key markets for Britain’s staple commodities, such as pig iron and cotton. And, from foreign lands Britain brought back the fruits of the world: textiles from India, tea from China – and soon, the treasure that lay deep beneath the earth of southern Africa.

*

Kimberley’s first diamonds had been discovered some four years before Rhodes arrived. In 1867, one Schalk van Niekerk was visiting his neighbour Jacob, near Hopetown on the Orange river, when his eye was caught by one of the brilliant stones their children were using to play marbles. According to the legend, Jacob was generous: ‘take it away with you, by all means, if you fancy it’. Dispatched by post to Grahamstown, and on to Cape Town, it was studied by the British Colonial Secretary Richard Southey, who immediately saw the significance of the solitary stone. ‘Gentlemen,’ he announced, ‘this is the rock on which the future success of South Africa will be built.’24 Two years later, van Niekerk came across another gem, owned by a local witch-doctor; he offered all he owned for it, and subsequently sold the 84-carat ‘Star of Africa’ for £11,000.

More diamonds were then found along the Orange and Vaal rivers, and out on the open veldt around Kimberley. Before long, speculators were arriving to buy the farms, snapping up claims on Du Toits Pan, Bultfontein and Vooruitzicht, the latter farm owned by the De Beer brothers. The rush of diggers was now immense. By the time Rhodes arrived, the great plateau of the Kimberley mining area had become a jam-packed British protectorate, after Lieutenant-Governor Keate of the Natal was summoned to adjudicate competing claims to the land – from the Griqua (a mixed-race group descended from early European Cape settlers), led by Nicholaas Waterboer, the indigenous southern Tswana (Tlhaping), and the local Boers.25 In October 1871, Keate awarded the land to Waterboer, who promptly placed the territory – ‘Griqualand West’ – under the administration of Queen Victoria.

‘I should like you to have a peep at the kopje from my tent door at the present moment,’ wrote Rhodes to his mother; ‘It is like an immense number of ant-heaps covered with black ants, as thick as can be.’ Around him were 10,000 white settlers (a quarter from abroad) and 30,000 black labourers digging on 3,600 plots, each 30 x 30 square feet, spread across four great mines named after the original farms: Dutoitspan, Bultfontein, and – the two richest, on the Vooruitzicht land – De Beers and Colesberg Kopje. Along the fourteen parallel roadways lined with carts, the diggers dashed in and out of the pits, carrying dirt and diamonds with them. ‘Fancy an immense plain with right in its centre a great mass of white tents and iron stores,’ Rhodes went on, ‘and on one side of it, all mixed up with the camp, mounds of lime like ant-hills; the country round is all flat with just thorn trees here and there; and you have some idea of Dutoitspan’.26

Kimberley’s promise, however, was not enough to hold Rhodes’s brother; Herbert – as Cecil wrote to his mother on 18 October 1870 – ‘had not much luck’ in the diamond fields.27 He offered young Cecil a rapid introduction to the business, left his claims under Cecil’s control, briefed his brother on Kimberley’s social world – and promptly left for England.28 The tall and fair Cecil, ‘moody and deaf to the chatter around him’, was left to cut a distinctive figure on his own; a fellow miner remembered him: ‘wearing flannels of the school playing field... his tall figure crumpled up on a inverted bucket, as he sat scrapping his gravel surrounded by his plucky Zulus’.29

Rhodes worked every waking hour. On days when a digger failed to show up – usually because he had made enough money to return to his village – he would roll up his sleeves, climb down into the mines, and dig for himself.30 His three claims proved lucky. ‘On this kopje,’ Rhodes wrote, ‘I should think nearly every day they find a diamond over 50 carats.’ Here were rough diamonds ‘of all shapes, sizes and colours under the sun’. ‘I find on average 30 carats a week and am working one of the few whole claims in the kopje; a claim in fact that will take me four years to work out at the present rate.’31 Within just two months, Cecil was making £100 a week (worth somewhere between £50,000 and £70,000 a week in today’s money), and striving just as hard above the ground as he did below it, making good friends among the wealthy claim-holders, administrators and professionals who had arrived from all over the world.32

When Herbert returned to Kimberley, he had in tow the third Rhodes brother, Frank, who was asked to mind the Kimberley claims while Cecil and Herbert set off to the Transvaal to test the emerging news of new gold finds. One look at the potential there was enough for Herbert to sell his Kimberley diamond claims to Cecil, who, with his rapid profits, was now worth some £10,000.33 But it was no safeguard against the sudden strike of what appeared to be a minor ‘heart attack’. Desperately needing to recuperate, Rhodes turned his mind from mining. It was, he decided, time to reapply to the University of Oxford. As luck would have it, the Provost of Oriel College, Dr Edward Hawkins, was the uncle of a Kimberley acquaintance, and, notwithstanding some uncertainty about Cecil’s qualifications, he was quickly offered admission.34

Oxford, however, was to offer little respite. For on 1 November 1873, Rhodes received news that his beloved mother had died. Struggling to cope with the loss, he caught a chill while rowing on the Isis.35 Weak and worried, Rhodes sought the advice of a London chest and throat specialist, Dr Morell Mackenzie, whose prescription was simple and urgent: he should return to the hot, dry climate of Kimberley immediately.

In no mood to quibble, Rhodes was back in Africa within weeks, only to discover Kimberley in chaos but British policy on the brink of breakthrough. A worldwide recession had sparked a sharp fall in diamond prices. Banks were foreclosing on struggling mine-owners. A year of drought, followed by flooding, had triggered the collapse of mines and a surge in prices for food and transport. The crisis would prove the making of Rhodes.

Together with an old friend, Charles Rudd – a man a decade older and a cool counterbalance to Rhodes’s often impulsive nature – Rhodes bid aggressively for a De Beers mining board contract to drain the flooded mines.36 It was now clear in Kimberley that the future of diamond mining lay with large-scale ventures big enough to drive shafts deeper underground, where the soft yellow dirt turned to the ‘hard blue’ clay that required mechanized digging.37 But, as the mines went deeper, so they filled with water. Within a year, it was obvious that Rhodes’s ramshackle machinery was failing. A temporary contract was awarded to a rival, only for their machinery mysteriously to break down on Boxing Day 1875. Furious allegations of sabotage were flung at Rhodes, who promptly threatened to sue for libel. Together, Rhodes and Rudd survived, and when prohibitions on stock companies were lifted in 1876, which had had the effect of protecting the smaller digging interests, the partners put their Vooruitzicht mine claims together and looked to what they could roll up around them.

By spring 1876, Rhodes was secure enough to return to Oxford, where life would now prove rather more congenial than his first term. He remained deeply engaged with business; indeed, among his letters in the Oxford University archives, are detailed orders for a pumping engine to be shipped to Rudd & Co., ‘with all the latest improvements in the economy of fuel’ and at ‘the utmost speed possible’. But Rhodes worked harder socially than academically, and before long his social life was expensive enough to require a loan from Rudd’s brother (‘It is very unpleasant being under an obligation to any one... but I had not a sixpence and do not like to bother my father’) and absorbing enough to provoke a battle or two with his professors.38 ‘My dons and I’, he wrote to Rudd, ‘have had some tremendous skirmishes.’ He was elected to the Bullingdon Club in 1877, and later joined the Freemasons in the Apollo University Lodge.39

And while Rhodes was ascending socially in Oxford, Britain was about to surge ahead in southern Africa.

*

The British were relative latecomers in Africa, compared with, for example, the Portuguese or the Dutch. Britain’s African trade dated back to the barbarities of slavery and although England entered the slave trade late in the day, its merchants soon dominated, as demand for slaves to work the Caribbean sugar plantations multiplied in the years after 1660. By the 1750s, around 28,000 slaves a year were shipped west by the Company of Royal Adventurers (formed in 1660).*7 Between 1662 and the abolition of the transatlantic trade in 1807, British ships organized by the slave traders and ivory dealers who built cities such as Liverpool, carried 3.4 million people across the sea – some 50 per cent of all the slaves transported.40 Indeed, in the final quarter-century of the trade, Liverpool merchants were financing 75 per cent of all the slave voyages, buying men and women for £25 on the Gold Coast and selling them for twice the price in the West Indies.

Perversely, it was the abolition of slavery that accounted for Britain’s first territorial possessions on the African continent, as British forces moved in to suppress the last outposts of the slavers in Sierra Leone, Gambia, the Gold Coast and Lagos. From this inauspicious start, it was British power in Africa which helped trigger the European ‘Scramble for Africa’ whereby within two decades of 1880, 10,000 African kingdoms were reduced to just forty states determined by the Europeans. A third were under British control.41

Britain flexed its imperial muscles everywhere. In Africa’s west, George Goldie, a son of Manx smugglers, had carved out the Royal Niger Company. In the north-east, Egypt was invaded as a ‘temporary expedient’ on 31 July 1882, to preserve the safety of British and France ownership of the Suez Canal – acquired in 1875 from a bankrupt khedive, but now jeopardized by local nationalist demands.42 In the south, the old Dutch Cape Colony, strategically so vital to Britain’s communications with India, had fallen to Britain in the months after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Neighbouring Natal became a British colony in 1843, and by the 1870s was home to 17,000 white settlers and 300,000 Africans, surrounded by the territories of the Zulu to the north, the Sotho to the west and Mpondo of the still independent ‘Pondoland’ to the south. Within just twenty years, a polyglot region of twenty southern African states and territories would be rolled up and a further 1 million square miles added to the British Empire.

Not long after Rhodes returned to the Cape Colony, Henry Herbert, the Lord Porchester and 4th Earl of Carnarvon, was appointed as Secretary of State for the Colonies in Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservative government of 1874. Known as ‘Twitters’, on account of his nervous tics, he was responsible for the self-rule and confederation of Canada; but southern Africa worried him. He saw there ‘the threat of a general and simultaneous rising of Kaffirdom against white civilisation’. South Africa, he concluded, needed the sort of self-government he had introduced to Canada.43 Carnarvon had hoped initially that the Cape Colony would take a lead. Now home to 237,000 whites (representing about two-thirds of southern Africa’s white population), its first self-governing administration had been elected in 1872. But, after two abortive attempts to call a conference on confederation in southern Africa, and then a failed London conference in August 1876, Carnarvon decided to force matters by exploiting a Boer defeat at the hands of the Pedi.

In January 1877, he instructed the local Natal secretary of ‘Native Affairs’, governor, Theophilus Shepstone, to march across the Orange River and annex the South African Republic as the Crown Colony of the Transvaal, with a nominated legislature. Three months later, Shepstone was joined by Sir Bartle Frere, appointed High Commissioner of Southern Africa and Governor of the Cape Colony in March 1877. The suppressor of the slave trade in Zanzibar, Frere was a devotee of Disraeli’s ‘new imperialism’, and quickly embarked on a series of border wars with the African kingdoms along the coast between the Cape and Natal, intervening first to defeat the Xhosa in the Transkei in 1877.

For Rhodes in Oxford, the advance of imperialism no doubt influenced what was perhaps the most important piece of his written work, the ‘Confession of Faith’, set down on the day he was inducted into the Freemasons. It crystallized Rhodes’s world-view: the duty of the Anglo-Saxon race to embark on imperial expansion in order to civilize other races through intensive colonialization.44 To the document, Rhodes appended a will, drafted in September 1877 (and the first of many wills), to provide for a secret society to support the aims of his ‘Confession’ along with funds for the Secretary of State for the Colonies, who had so inspired him.45

Six months later, reports in the ‘Ecclesiastical Intelligence’ columns of Friday 8 March 1878 brought sad news. ‘The death of the late Vicar of Bishop’s Stortford (Mr Rhodes) is announced,’ declared the Essex Standard.46 His servant, reported the Chelmsford Chronicle, ‘found him lying upon the floor dead, evidently having fallen while dressing’.47 Both of his parents were now dead. There was nothing in England to hold him, and so Rhodes set sail for southern Africa once more, even more ambitious than when he left.

*

Over the decade that followed, while his personal life grew complicated, Rhodes’s political career and his commercial powerhouse brought him a brief and brilliant domination of southern Africa.

Once back in South Africa, and against the backdrop of a newly assertive British policy, Rhodes quickly became the centre of an extraordinary knot of Kimberley men – the ‘twelve apostles’ who messed together on the diamond fields.48 Dr Leander Starr was a brilliant Scottish doctor, Robert Graham was a lawyer, and Alfred Beit was a financial mastermind. When Rhodes and Beit first met, they discovered some similar ambitions. Beit supposedly announced: ‘I’m going to control the whole diamond output before I’m much older’. Rhodes simply replied: ‘That’s funny. I’ve made up my mind to do the same. We’d better join hands.’49

One friend, however, was particularly special. Neville Pickering, the son of a Port Elizabeth clergyman, was a cheerful young man, a decade younger than Rhodes who took him on as a secretary. A deep companionship began that would last until Pickering’s untimely death in 1888.50 They were seldom apart. ‘They shared the same office and the same dwelling-house, worked together, played together, shot together,’ said a friend, while a contemporary described the relationship as ‘an absolutely lover-like friendship’.51 No letters, diaries, or notes exist to illuminate their relationship any further.

Together, Rhodes and the men around him now set about amassing a fortune by the tried and tested method of building a monopoly. Rhodes owned the largest share in the De Beers mine, but both he and Rudd knew that in order to set the price of diamonds, they needed to be the biggest diamond-sellers, and that meant becoming the biggest buyers of their competitors’ mining claims, with enough financial muscle to finance the costs of digging the ever deeper mines. Between 1878 and 1880, therefore, Rhodes and Rudd began rolling up their rivals’ shares of the De Beers mine.*8 The copies of letters between them, stored in the Oxford University archives, are a fascinating insight into the daily business of organizing everything from pumps to buy-outs, building a business capable of digging ever deeper as the ground began to collapse. ‘I do not think the kopje will hold out until the 1st of December,’ Rhodes penned in October 1879, noting the need to access pumping machines. He preferred to give shares rather than sign bills – ‘I hate liabilities,’ he noted in September 1882, discussing the buy-out of rival claims.

On 1 April 1880, the pair took a huge step forward, joining forces with a host of claim-owners to float the De Beers Mining Company with a share capital of £200,00052 to create one of twelve joint stock companies worth a combined value of £2.5 million53 (worth between £1 billion and £1.8 billion today) which together controlled seventy-one Kimberley claims and dug £4 million-worth of diamonds a year.

Rhodes’s timing was fortunate. An economic depression struck again in 1882–84, and many small De Beers miners were happy to sell out,54 not least because the political crisis on the Cape’s eastern frontier in the Transvaal and Zululand was taking a turn for the worse. It was a crisis in which Rhodes now decided to deal himself a hand, with election to the Cape’s Parliament.

Not long after Kimberley’s traditional chief, Nicholas Waterboer, had placed his ancestral home under British protection, both the Griqua and Tlhaping were slowly evicted. When they rebelled, they were crushed, and Kimberley was incorporated into the Cape Colony, with the right to elect members to the Cape assembly. In April 1881, Rhodes won his place as the junior Member for Barkly West and wasted no time in advancing the mine-owners’ cause.55 He quickly became chair of the select committee investigating illegal diamond trafficking and ensured the stiffest possible penalties in the subsequent Diamond Trade Act of 1882.*9

Rhodes now acquired a habit for which he became famous – of pulling out maps of southern Africa and declaring: ‘All this to be painted red; that is my dream.’56 He acquired a majority share of the Cape Argus, the largest newspaper in the Cape Colony, and while he promised never to interfere with the paper’s opinions, his speeches, infrequent though they were, received plenty of attention.57 There was certainly much news to cover, for the ‘forward policy’ of Lord Carnarvon, who had resigned in 1878, had begun to collapse as African tribes and the Boers (and their German allies) fought back against British power.

Sir Henry Bartle Frere had followed his annexation of the Transvaal and the Transkei by attempting to disarm the Sotho in Basutoland in 1878, before then provoking conflict with King Cetshwayo’s Zulu nation, on the border of British southern Africa. His forces were at first disastrously defeated by the Zulus at the Battle of Isandhlwana, in January 1879, before eventual victory over Cetshwayo later that year. The subsequent division of Zululand into competing chiefdoms, sparked years of civil war. On another front, Boer resistance to the consolidation of British control in 1880 erupted into the First Anglo-Boer War and the British defeat at Majuba in the Transvaal prompted the new British prime minister, Gladstone, to withdraw from the annexed lands.

A new, delicate balance of power was not agreed until the London convention of 1884. The Boer republics, now independent once more, were emboldened and expanding into neighbouring lands where the British had destroyed the power of African kingdoms. To contain their ambitions, Britain now took a direct stake in the region, declaring a protectorate over Bechuanaland, the vast swathe of 276,000 square miles of south-central Africa up to the lands around the Limpopo and Zambezi. But the balance lasted merely months. In August 1884, the chancellor of the newly united Germany, Bismarck – long an admirer of the East India Company – was persuaded by a Bremen businessman, F. A. Luderitz, to extend German control of a tiny coastal enclave around Angra Pequeña further along the south-west African coast and inland, claiming for Germany territory that become its colony of South West Africa (Namibia). The risk was obvious: a German–Boer alliance could now forge a united territory, from the Boer republics in the east to Germany’s new territory in the west, creating a northern barrier hemming in British southern Africa.

The reaction in London and the Cape was furious. ‘In these circumstances,’ declared Joseph Chamberlain in London, ‘I do not think that we should allow him [Bismarck] to forestall us again in South Africa.’ Sir Donald Currie, a well-known London financier, spoke for the Cape business community when he told Gladstone that ‘since the political unrest and uncertainty east and west of Transvaal, the trade of South Africa has fallen off more than 15% and is rapidly diminishing.’58 Under pressure, Gladstone’s Cabinet agreed to annex the entire south-eastern African coastline up to St Lucia Bay, 150 miles north of Durban, instructing the HMS Goshawk to hoist a flag and have it ‘saluted at more than one place’.59

As Rhodes predicted, the Boers reacted immediately. On 16 September 1884, President Paul Kruger of the Transvaal issued a ‘Provisional Proclamation’ absorbing the territory of Goshen in Bechuanaland, carved out by Boer mercenaries two years before. It was the first step to connecting the Transvaal across the great expanse of Bechuanaland with the new German south-western territories.*10 In London, on 19 November 1884, the Cabinet met to agree its response. An extra penny was put on income tax to finance, among other ventures, an expedition to keep Bechuanaland British, led by Major-General Sir Charles Warren, and in a final effort to forestall war, a small commission was established to negotiate a peaceful resolution, and Cecil Rhodes joined up to do his bit.

Rhodes approached the talks as a Boer sympathizer. Rhodes thought Kruger ‘one of the most remarkable men in south Africa’. When, in a discussion on the 1880–81 war, the founder of Afrikaner nationalism, Jan Hofmeyr, expressed pity at fighting between British and Boers, Rhodes replied: ‘No, it is not, I have quite changed my opinion. It is a good thing. It has made Englishmen respect Dutchmen.’60 Crucially, Rhodes wanted a South African empire run from the Cape, not from London, and so he wanted a solution that minimized conflict with Afrikaners so that their representatives in the Cape Parliament – the Afrikaner Bond Party – would acquiesce in the Cape Colony’s annexation of southern Bechuanaland.61 As Rhodes saw it, control of southern Africa’s interior was vital to Cape interests. ‘I solemnly warn this House,’ he once told the Cape Parliament, ‘that if it departs from the control of the interior we shall fall from the position of the paramount state in South Africa which is our right.’

General Warren, on the other hand, wanted something very different; he saw Boer/Afrikaner ambitions as an impediment to Britain’s relations with indigenous Africans, and so favoured an imperial protectorate run from London. ‘If such a policy is pursued,’ Rhodes declared later in Parliament, ‘it will endanger the whole of our social relationships with colonists of Dutch descent.’62 At odds with Warren, Rhodes resigned his commission post in February 1885 – but not before negotiating security of Boer mercenaries’ land titles in the new little republic of Stellaland, under Cape protection.63 Warren on the other hand saw his task as eviction of the white ‘freebooters’ and the creation of a protectorate under the security of the Crown, which he duly secured a month later, on 23 March 1885.

*

Rhodes may have been frustrated with his political progress; but business, on the other hand, was on the brink of a breakthrough. In 1882, there had been more than a hundred companies competing in the diamond fields of Kimberley. But the industry was fast consolidating. By 1885, just forty-two companies and fifty-six private claims held the ground – and it was Cecil Rhodes leading the charge.64 Now worth £50,000 a year, Rhodes and his friends at De Beers were mining in richer grounds, and since 1883, they had paid far more attention to the nitty-gritty of comparative costs and yields. As the buy-outs of Rhodes’s competitors continued, the value of De Beers quadrupled to £841,550.65

A study of De Beers’ annual reports reveals how Rhodes’s ambition was grounded in a big but simple strategy: control of an entire mine would let the firm shift from open-cast mining to digging tunnels underground, transforming the scale and profitability of the business. It was a shift becoming imperative, as the reef began to collapse. ‘Your directors have realised more and more daily the absolute necessity for doing all in their power to promote amalgamation,’ commented the annual report in 1883.66 Over 1885, De Beers swallowed London & South African along with Independent Diamond Mining Co., Baxter’s Gully, the Australian Gully Block and Eagle Diamond Mining Company, creating a compact block of 360 claims. It was a critical development, ‘especially in view of the absolute necessity of adopting at once a system of working underground’.67

The following year, the mining firms United and Elma were added, along with more claims, as the directors pushed through a London share registry to ease capital-raising. In 1887, the directors reported that they had ‘continued their policy of promoting, by every legitimate means in their power, the amalgamation of the several interests in the mine’, wrapping up Gem D.M. Co., Oriental and the Victoria Company, largely through secret share buy-ups. The result was that Rhodes was now able to report: ‘We are now relying entirely on the underground.’

Better still, Rhodes was surrounded by some of the best minds in the business, for both Frederic Stow and Alfred Beit had joined the De Beers board. Both would now prove vital in Rhodes’s most important battle of all – the titanic struggle with Barney Barnato to control South Africa’s diamonds.

The grandson of a rabbi, and son of a Whitechapel shop-keeper, Barney Barnato had invested his life-savings in sixty boxes of cigars, which he had ferried to Kimberley and sold at enormous profit.68 With the proceeds, he set himself up as a ‘kopje-walloper’, shuttling between the diamond diggers’ tables and buying up diamonds as they tumbled from the gravel. Amassing £3,000, he sunk the lot into some of the best blocks of the Kimberley ground.69

By the end of 1886, Rhodes’s De Beers had extracted diamonds worth just under £324,000 – more than a five-fold increase on the value of the output in 1881.70 By 1887, De Beers and Barnato’s firm, Kimberley Central, were the kings of the diamond fields; but Barnato remained the biggest. His firm was valued at £2.45 million, with an annual output of £1.41 million,71 but he shared control of the Kimberley ‘pipe’, the deep, narrow cone of solidified, ancient magma rich in diamonds, with Compagnie Française, the biggest remaining independent firm.72 De Beers, worth £2 million, was smaller with an output of £1.022 million – but it controlled its own field.73

With careful selection of engineers and good methods, Rhodes cut the cost of extracting a carat of diamonds, from 16s to 7s 2d, and cut the rate of theft by putting his workers in compounds. But, he calculated the market size for diamonds at around £4 million a year, and to keep the prices up he needed to reduce supply – under the control of just one firm. Barnato had precisely the same ambition. And so battle for the richest diamond monopoly in the world now commenced.

Rhodes’s genius was to realize that the key to victory lay not in southern Africa, but in London, from where he could channel cash thirsty for foreign investment into his own designs for an African empire. He needed a London finance partner and found the perfect match in the House of Rothschild.

*

Since the days of Nathan Rothschild, Rothschild’s had become a leader in the new British services industry that, in a world of fast steamships, global telegraph links, booming commodity prices and worldwide industrialization, now dominated banking, insurance and shipping.*11 From around 1780, Britain was already the world’s service leader; a little more than a century later, the nation boasted more registered shipping tonnage than the rest of the world put together, underpinning London’s place at the centre of the world’s insurance and trade settlement business.74 Wherever British merchants organized cargoes, they insured in London, discounted in London, and banked in branches of British banks flung around the world. Britain’s new global banks built their business oiling the wheels of Britain’s new multinationals, as firms built on the foundations of the old agency houses of the 1830s which organized the export, shipping, insurance and sales of Britain’s cotton-makers. All over the world, similar patterns emerged as new multinationals took shape; perhaps with a headquarters in London or Glasgow or Liverpool, they grew blessed with a secure currency backed by the Gold Standard and a vast army of British investors were happy to invest abroad.

The Bank of England’s promise to switch a pound, on demand, into gold was critical in giving the world the confidence to trade. Investors knew that when crises came – as they did in 1847 and 1866 (and later, in 1890 and 1907) – the Bank would always defend the pound. To spare the need to ship gold to settle debts, traders were fixing their deals in sterling from the 1870s, knowing that their own currencies were fixed to the pound, which in turn, was firmly pegged to gold. For industrialists, of course, the Gold Standard had its problems. Interest rates tended to move ‘pro-cyclically’ as the Bank tended to put up interest rates in an export boom to off-set any strain on reserves as the money supply (and hence possible calls on the Bank) went up. In part, this was because the Bank, still run privately, kept reserves as low as possible in order to maximize profits.*12 The result was interest rates that moved constantly: between 1851 and 1885, the bank rate changed on average every six weeks, and thereafter every two months.

The Gold Standard, however, suited British merchants well, and they diversified into extracting, financing, shipping, and trading the natural resources of the world, whetting the appetite of British investors for foreign assets. All over the world, old merchants moved into commodities, services and infrastructure. The Holts of Liverpool, for instance, started in cotton but soon diversified into shipping, creating the famous Blue Funnel Line, and worked closely with John Swire & Co. to expand throughout Asia. John Swire had started as a small textile import–export company, and began trading in Shanghai when the American Civil War disrupted the cotton trade in 1861. Within a few years, he founded the China Navigation Company, sending Mississippi-style paddle-steamers up the Yangtze river. James Wilson was another example. Born in 1805, the son of a wealthy textile mill owner, he was granted a royal charter by Queen Victoria to found the Chartered Bank, which boomed as the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and the telegraph reached China in 1871. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited was founded by another Scot, Thomas Sutherland, in 1865, who was working for P&O and realized that roaring trade in Hong Kong needed trade banks. Other firms, such as Jardine Matheson and Dent & Co., simply took over the trade of the old East India Company.

Together, these businesses delivered a flow of dividends and returns on Britain’s overseas investments from 1870 that were bigger than capital exports. The companies tended to be highly profitable, building great networks with very little capital, and generating huge returns of 10 or 11 per cent a year.*13 Together, between 1870 and 1913, incoming payments to Britain outstripped capital exports by around £1 billion, earning the nation some £200 million a year – about 10 per cent of national income – by the eve of the First World War.75

For the individual investor, the returns were excellent. Provincial industrialists tended to keep their fortunes at home, but investors in London and England’s south-east were happy to spend abroad, earning a better return on what was on offer at home. *14 Indeed, London investors took half of the shares in businesses operating abroad.76 A quarter of shareholders in foreign- and empire-based firms were ‘peers and gentleman’, and many big landowners, such as the 8th Duke of Devonshire, systematically moved money out of agriculture and into overseas railways and government stocks. This was a pattern emulated by the big institutional investors such as insurance companies, whose foreign stocks and bonds rose from 10 per cent of their portfolios in 1870 to a massive 40 per cent by 1913.77 Naturally, they now had a vested interest in their foreign investments staying safe and secure; and in Her Majesty’s government, they had a doughty defender of their interests.

Southern Africa was now poised to become one of the world’s greatest foreign investment markets for UK investors. Britain’s investment pattern had therefore begun to change around the time that Rhodes first arrived in Africa. Back in 1854, some £195–£230 million was invested overseas; but, following two great surges – the early 1880s to 1891 (when domestic interest rates fell to 3 or 3.5 per cent for most of the decade), and then the early 1900s to 1913 – foreign investment multiplied to total some £1.7 billion (by 1913).*15 The total nominal value of British overseas investment was now £4.2 billion, twice as much as any other nation’s investment, and up to one-half of all the world’s foreign-owned assets.78 A third of national wealth was now tied up abroad.*16

Between 1850 and 1914, around 70 to 80 per cent of investment was ‘portfolio investment’, channelled into share issues of thousands of companies – for railways, docks, tramways, telegraphs, telephones, gas and electric companies, including the railroads connecting America’s eastern seaboard with the Midwest (£650 million), the railways of the British dominions (£325 million) and India’s rail network (£150 million).*

But the balance of investment was direct investment into thousands of traders around the world. It was overwhelmingly concentrated in mining (25 per cent), railways (27 per cent) and land (18 per cent).80 From the 1890s, most of the investment was flowing to the British Empire, overwhelmingly to the ‘white settlement’ countries such as in southern Africa, to back entrepreneurs the likes of Rhodes.81 *17 In the mid-1880s, Rhodes had plenty from Britain’s investing classes.

*

To secure Rothschild’s help, Rhodes first engaged Gardner Williams, a mining engineer once employed by Nathaniel Rothschild, to persuade the great banker to back a hugely expensive plan to buy out the Compagnie Française. ‘If the French would sell,’ declared Rothschild, he would ‘see if they could raise’ the £1 million required.

In Paris, Rhodes negotiated a price of £1.4 million. But Barnato was determined not to lose, countering with an offer of £1.7 million. Rhodes now threw in his hand, but cunningly exchanged the Compagnie Française shares he had accumulated for 20 per cent of Barnato’s firm, Kimberley Central. With Rothschild’s help, Rhodes now raised £2.4 million of debenture stock*18 and began buying Kimberley Central shares until he was within inches of control. ‘We saw’, Rhodes explained later to De Beers shareholders, ‘that you could never deal with obstinate people until you get the whiphand of them.’82

In March 1888, negotiating through the night, Barnato surrendered: ‘when you have been with him half an hour’, he later sighed ‘you not only agree with him but come to believe you have always held that opinion’. He gave up control of Kimberley Central for a holding in a new, merged firm. On 13 March 1888, Rhodes formally registered De Beers Consolidated with a balance sheet of £3.1 million and appointed Barnato as governor for life. The pair appeared together in some triumph at De Beers’ annual general meeting.

‘Since we met last,’ declared Rhodes to shareholders, ‘we have completed the entire amalgamation of the De Beers mine and I might point out to you on what a profitable basis it was effected.’83 The ability to tunnel deep under the ground of their old rivals, Gem and Victoria, had created enormous value: £1 million of share value for an acquisition price of £100,000. With the ability to extend deep tunnels throughout the whole De Beers mine, Rhodes now foresaw output worth £3–4 million, equal to the value of the entire Cape Colony. ‘We have got an industry,’ he boasted, ‘which is almost like a government within a government’.

Crucially, the key risk faced by the diamond industry, announced Rhodes, was now no more. ‘The risk of over-production is over. You possess the whole of De Beers, three-fourths of Kimberley and a controlling interest in Bultfontein and Dutoitspan. It is merely a question of a few months – well I will say a year – when you will have complete control of the diamond industry.’ To his backer, Lord Rothschild, Rhodes was a little more circumspect, advising him on 29 October 1888 that ‘I think we must expect to pass another two years before we have a complete monopoly, when I think we might fairly expect to make nearly £2 million per annum.’ But there was no disguising the triumph: Cecil Rhodes had created a behemoth that controlled over 90 per cent of South Africa’s diamond output. Its profits were about to go through the roof. Profits on capital steadily increased, from around 7 per cent to 28 per cent a decade later.

Rhodes moved quickly to exploit his new control of the diamond fields. Production costs dropped to 10s/carat, and profits rose to 20s/carat, as half the black labour force and a quarter of the white workers were made redundant.84 Compounds were established to house the remaining black workers, who were now subject to humiliating routine strip searches.85 It was a welcome rush of revenue, for Rhodes was now about to require every ounce of his capital – and his connections – to profit in a southern Africa suddenly transformed by a new discovery.

*

On 5 June 1885, at 11am, a man named Harry Struben arrived on the tennis court behind the Union Club in the Transvaal’s capital of Pretoria to brief President Kruger’s advisers and assorted business associates with important news. There had been rumours of gold in southern Africa since the 1850s, and small deposits had been found in the Transvaal. But it now appeared, said Struben, who with his brother had been investigating their land in Transvaal’s Witwatersrand area, that the gold reefs there were the richest ever found.

He was not wrong. The 40-mile-deep seam, along the ridge of mountains between Heidelberg and Potchefstroom, was soon producing a fifth of the world’s gold. In September 1886, the ’Rand was declared a public digging, and within three years, the new city of Johannesburg, built beside it, had become one of the wonders of the world. ‘Never in the history of the universe,’ penned Lady Bellairs during her journey through town in 1889, ‘was such an extraordinary city conceived or carried out as Johannesburg... Day after day comes the news of fresh discoveries... We are simply living in a sea of gold.’86

Fortunes were made. Soon, 130 of the principal companies working the mines were worth £103 million. By 1892, the first deep-level mines were in operation, and by the end of the century a myriad of firms had consolidated into just eight mining giants, with huge access to capital markets, and centralized research services. The country was now producing a quarter of the world’s gold, worth some £16 million a year. By 1904, a million white settlers, most of them British, would call the place home, with Johannesburg becoming one of the biggest cities on earth. British investment rose from £34 million in 1884 to an incredible £351 million in 1911, the sharpest rise in the nation’s foreign investment anywhere on earth.

Rhodes had been monitoring developments carefully, but in truth was late to the party. In a letter to Rudd, scribbled on 12 December 1886, he noted that ‘E. Jones returned yesterday he has a high opinion of the Witwatersrand’. But Rhodes was already lamenting how the prices of claims had risen: ‘It is very difficult to purchase anything worth having.’ Two months later, Rhodes and his partners launched their prospectus for the Gold Fields Company of South Africa, ‘with a capital of £250,000’ as the media announced, ‘for the purposes of acquiring and dealing with certain auriferous and other mineral properties, interests and rights... and also for carrying on general exploration’.87

However, as Rhodes admitted to Rothschild in October 1888, ‘I have had bad luck, as though I have done well and hold a good deal, I missed the best part and... thus have returned too late to buy into the richer parts.’ Eventually, by the end of the century, Rhodes’s Consolidated Gold Fields would – along with Wernher, Beit & Eckstein, which mined half the gold on the ’Rand – dwarf its rivals.88 More immediately, there was a silver lining too, for Rhodes’s real opportunity lay not in the gold fields themselves, but in the change they provoked in the balance of power between Britain and the Boers.

Gold transformed the might of the Boers’ South African Republic. By 1890, the republic boasted annual revenues of £4 million89 – far more than the Cape Colony budget – and the new might of the Boers presented the new Conservative government in London with a dilemma: how to keep Bechuanaland secure, sandwiched as it was between German South West Africa and the Transvaal. It was too large and expensive a territory either for London or the Cape Colony to administer or defend.90 General Warren had recommended a Crown Colony complete with a civil service and an army; but that would cost London some £250,000 a year ‘as well as risk of future wars in the interior’. Nor was the Cape government keen to pick up the tab.

Flush with the profits of De Beers, Cecil Rhodes now offered a plan. A ‘British South Africa Company’ – paid for not by taxes, but by a new trading monopoly – could control the space between the Namib desert on the south-west coast and Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique), extending northwards to meet the missionary trading colonies founded by David Livingstone around the Great Lakes of Central Africa.

Quickly, Rhodes marshalled his friends to advance – and finance – his vision. An old Oxford friend and politically committed Cape colonist, Sidney Shippard, had been appointed Administrator of Bechuanaland on 1 September 1885, and with his deputy, the Reverend John Moffat, was sympathetic to Rhodes’s idea. They soon persuaded Lobengula, the tribal king of the Ndebele (Matabele) lands, to agree a treaty – the so-called ‘Moffat Treaty’ – barring ‘foreign interference’ from his dominions.

Rhodes now quickly drew together his political and financial backers. Shippard liked the idea of a chartered company securing the space, and so Rhodes dispatched Charles Rudd ‘to look at the country and see what he can do’. Writing in August 1888 to Shippard, Rhodes expressed his fear of losing Lobengula’s territory to ‘adventurers’; ‘it is no use my stepping for my company to assist in the government of a shell’, Rhodes wrote; ‘If we get Matabelland (sic) we shall get the balance of Africa[.] I do not stop in my ideas at [the] Zambezi, and I am willing to work with you for it.’91 Just as assiduously, Rhodes lined up the support of Rothschild. From the Kimberley Club on 20 January 1888, he wrote: ‘My Lord... I also wish to have a talk with you over the Matabele concession as to which, when I have explained everything, I hope you will take a share.’ It was, said Rhodes, a wealthy land. ‘As to the gold all my reports only verify previous statements – the gold bearing reefs are simply endless.’*19

By October 1888, Rudd, with the connivance of Shippard and Moffat at the court of Lobengula, had secured a famous concession, ceding ‘full power to do all things necessary to win and procure minerals’. ‘Our concession is so gigantic,’ wrote Rudd, ‘it is like giving a man the whole of Australia.’ The Cape’s High Commissioner, Sir Hercules Robinson, quickly gave his imprimatur; ‘it appeared to me,’ minuted Robinson, ‘although a monopoly of the kind was not free from objections, it was, on the whole, in the interests of the Matabele’.92

When Lobengula discovered the Concession’s true sweep, he was furious: he dispatched his indunas to London in cahoots with a rival syndicate, led by Lord Gifford and George Cawston, who were arguing for an alternative charter.*20 It was now that Robinson proved truly decisive. In January 1888, Rhodes had asked for Rothschild’s help in keeping the high commissioner in place, because ‘he has steadily fought out the expansion northwards and completely surrounded the republics... If we leave matters now quietly to work, with the development of the gold in the Transvaal, we shall have a united South Africa under the English flag.’93 Sure enough, Robinson argued to London that any contender for a charter must boast Cape colonial support – support that only Rhodes could muster. It was the decisive argument.

Rhodes now squared his rivals, through the simple device of a merger of the rival syndicates. Fearful of German expansionism in what Germany called ‘Mittelafrika’, the British Cabinet agreed Rhodes’s plan on 10 July 1889. ‘I don’t say it is an ideal solution,’ commented Lord Milner, ‘but it is better than letting the whole thing out of our fingers.’94 Lord Rothschild would take a major stake, and among the shareholders – as was later revealed – was to be Robinson himself, who not only owned 250 shares in the Central Search Association from May (he later became a director), but 2,500 shares in Rhodes’s United Concessions, which continued to own the mineral rights signed over in the Rudd Concession, which were now leased to the new British South Africa Company.

Rhodes’s letters over the course of 1889 and early 1890 reveal a mastermind at work, spinning the most extraordinary of webs. One sticking point was the refusal of the Gold Fields of South Africa company to participate; in a furious letter to Rudd, Rhodes declared that ‘I feel that GFSA have behaved disgracefully. I have no intention of working for those fellows for the balance of my life. A more ungrateful crew I have never come across.’95 But Rhodes’s letters to Beit, a fellow director of the BSAC, are even more extraordinary. In the back and forth, Rhodes dictates his way through the vast stream of issues to be resolved to assemble his great jigsaw: the terms of the grant from Lobengula; the financial arrangements between the BSAC, the Exploring and the Central Search companies; the secret agreement brokered with the Cape government to take financial responsibility for the railway he planned to build north; the negotiation of land grants from London for the track; share allocations; debenture finance for the Bechuanaland section; amendments to the charter’s grant; the deal with the African Lakes Company; the arming of De Beers volunteers; the movements of the Portuguese; and, crucially, the need to ensure that his company was properly capitalized. Writing to Beit in October 1889, Rhodes declared: ‘I hope you will see to the increase to £1,000,000 of Charter Co... it makes us feel safe. I feel perfectly confident as to getting Matabeleland but it will take 2½ years and I think my plan cannot fail.’96

From his bastion of monopoly strength in De Beers, Rhodes had transformed the size and scale of his business empire. Aided and abetted by Sir Hercules Robinson, the queen’s governor in Cape Town, and Lord Rothschild, the master of the Stock Exchange in London, Rhodes had created a masterplan for a private company to create an entire country, which would soon bear his name, as Rhodesia was born.

*

Little gold would ever be found in Rhodesia. And so a different solution would be needed. And miraculously, Rhodes now acquired the power to produce one. On 17 July 1890, his lifelong support of the Afrikaner Bond’s cause was repaid. With a little bribery and the support of an eclectic mix of political groups, Rhodes was elected Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. At the age of thirty-seven, he dominated not only the boardroom of the greatest diamond and exploration businesses in the world, but the Cabinet room of the Cape Colony. His final decade would now be shaped by three great struggles: the fight for power in the Cape; the battle to annex the Boers; and a war to command the BSAC lands that would eventually bear his name.

Rhodes’s first skirmishes were fought from the elegance of the Cape Colony’s Parliament buildings and planned from the haven of a new home. In the hills above Cape Town, Rhodes bought ‘Groote Schuur’, the old Dutch East India Company storehouses nestling in a hollow at the foot of Table Mountain. He had them rebuilt in the old Dutch farmhouse style, including a library brimming with translations of every source used in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, especially commissioned from Hatchard’s in London. The buildings were complemented by 1,500 acres of surrounding mountain and valley. ‘I want the big and simple,’ he told his architect Herbert Baker, ‘barbaric if you like’.97

Rhodes’s government included members of nearly all of Parliament’s sects, including Liberals and the Afrikaner Bond, and it was quickly labelled the ‘Cabinet of all talents’.98 His leadership was avowedly activist at home and abroad. He persuaded the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople to lend him angora goats to cross with Cape stock; he lobbied the US Congress on the protectionist McKinley Tariff, which in 1890 raised US import taxes to damaging levels. When phylloxera destroyed southern Africa’s vineyards, he bought American vines to replant. He annexed Pondoland (Mpondoland) on the Cape’s eastern coast in 1894, finally extinguishing its independence; and in May 1891, he even approached the prime ministers of New South Wales and Canada to propose foreign-policy co-operation: ‘between us’, Rhodes wrote, ‘we must invent some tie with our mother country that will prevent separation’.99

His strength, though, was rooted in a firm alliance with the Afrikaner Bond, cemented with laws to enshrine white rule. The old Masters and Servants Act (1856) was amended to let magistrates inflict corporal punishment on black residents for minor offences such as insolence. The Franchise and Ballot Act (1892) disenfranchised more than 3,000 black men while simultaneously bestowing the right to vote on 4,500 white men. The Glen Grey Act, Rhodes’s ‘favourite child’, was presented in late 1894, effectively creating a ‘native reserve’ for black Africans.*21100 When liberals in his Cabinet began growing restless, Rhodes sacked them. When they retaliated in 1894, questioning the ethics of Rhodes’s dual command of both the Cape government and the BSAC, an election was triggered, which Rhodes won with two-thirds of the vote.101

Rhodes’s command of both Cabinet and Company was now vital to his plans, because, with little gold to be found in the BSAC’s lands, a new means of extracting profit from the land was needed. The solution lay not in digging, but in settling. Rhodes had moved with lightning speed to drive a telegraph and railway north from the Cape into Lobengula’s lands, and he now needed a pioneer force to inhabit the area.*22 He had happened across a twenty-three-year-old adventurer, Frank Johnson, over breakfast at the Kimberley Club, who told Rhodes, over his eggs and bacon, that he could lead the venture for the lowest price. ‘Everyone tells me you are a lunatic,’ observed Rhodes, ‘but I have an instinct you are right and can do it.’102

Within five days of their meeting, Rhodes and Johnson agreed that the latter would lead a squad of 179 pioneers north. In May 1890, as Dr Jameson presented the BSAC’s charter to Lobengula, and to the accompaniment of a military band, along with the queen’s three tallest Lifeguards, the pioneers set off. Their reward was 7s 6d a day and the promise of fifteen gold claims and a 3,000-acre farm apiece. On 11 September they reached their new settlement, in Mashonaland, named Salisbury in honour of the British prime minister. ‘When at last I found that they were through to Fort Salisbury,’ said Rhodes, ‘I do not think there was a happier man in the country then myself.’103

By 1891, however, with profits thin, the BSAC’s shares were trading at a discount. But Rhodes had already spotted his next move: a leap from Lobengula’s lands north of the Zambezi, into central Africa, to join forces with David Livingstone’s Great Lakes Company, which he knew was short of money. In a letter to Rothschild in October 1888, Rhodes had sketched out the potential of a company controlling land from the Cape to the Great Lakes. Livingstone’s son-in-law, Rhodes recorded, had ‘pointed out to him, we ought to try and join; that is his company should work down through Tanganyika to the Zambezi to join our development from the South’. By 1893, Rhodes had bought the Great Lakes Company’s goodwill and stock in trade and persuaded Lord Salisbury to declare a protectorate over the Lake Nyassa district, with a £10,000-a-year police force paid for by Rhodes.

It was now vital to defend Bechuanaland – the great road north – from the competing claims of speculators and agents for the German and Portuguese governments. But, as Rhodes began building defences, relations with Lobengula were breaking down. ‘I thought you came to dig for gold,’ the bitter king wrote to the British government, ‘but it seems you have come... to rob me of my people as well.’104 As Ndebele attacks on the settlers multiplied, Rhodes saw the potential for an all-out war he could win. When the Ndebele attacked the Shona people near Fort Victoria in July 1893, Dr Jameson, now Company Administrator, had his excuse. After alerting Rhodes to his plans, the Cape prime minister wired back: ‘Read Luke xiv.31’ – and promptly sold 40,000 BSAC shares at a loss in order to fund personally the necessary matériel. ‘I was afraid’, he told the South Africa Committee three years later, that ‘the Doctor might have a bad time, and I did sell my interest in various things to provide money to carry on the war, because I felt that if there was a disaster, I was the only person to carry it through’.105

Into battle against Lobengula’s impis, numbering 3,000 men, were dispatched 700 of the BSAC’s ‘Volunteers’, armed with an astonishing new weapon: the Maxim machine gun.*23 Operated by a crew of five, the machine-gun fired 500 rounds a minute, fifty times faster than a rifle could reload. At the Shangani river, the Maxim was battle-tested for the first time. ‘The Matabele’, wrote an eye-witness, ‘never got nearer than 100 yards... for the Maxims far exceeded all expectations and mowed them down literally like grass.’ It spat bullets, said the Matabele, ‘like heaven sometimes spits hail’.106

Fifteen hundred of Lobengula’s warriors were slain in this First Matabele War; just four of the seven hundred Matabeleland invaders perished. When the smoke cleared, the BSAC’s shares rose immediately on the London Stock Exchange. Lobengula burnt his kraal and fled, dying two months later along the Shangani river, reputedly of smallpox. In May 1894, Matabeleland was deemed conquered land and assigned to the BSAC to govern as a Crown Colony, with complete freedom to allocate land as it pleased. The railway was pushed up to Salisbury, and the African Transcontinental Telegraph Company began to thread a line the length of the continent. By 1895, the African Lakes Company was yielding excellent profits, and quickly Rhodes added concessions along the Zambezi Valley, ceded by Barotse Chief Lewanika and bought from a local trader: 750,000 square miles – an area larger than Spain, France and the German Empire – was added to Queen Victoria’s dominions.

Triumphant in the north, Rhodes now turned his gaze on the Boers of the neighbouring South African Republic. Rhodes’s long political battle with President Kruger had proved one frustration after another. Rhodes had pushed a popular plan to build a railway line from the Cape to the Transvaal, but Kruger’s ambition was to skip free of any dependence on his neighbours with a line of his own, running east from his landlocked republic to Delagoa Bay, then under Portuguese control. But not only did Kruger block Rhodes’s railway plans, he kept import tariffs on Cape goods high. He eschewed all talk of a customs union. And while the newly emerging ‘Rhodesia’ seemed near empty of gold, the Witwatersrand seam seemed inexhaustible. Frustrated, Rhodes now began a shift from talk, to war. Preparations for the Jameson Raid were begun.

On Monday 30 December, the morning after Jameson’s men left Mafeking, the magistrate had telegraphed news of the troops’ departure to one of Rhodes’s ministers, Will Schreiner, who immediately forwarded it to Groote Schuur. Summoned late that night, Schreiner found Rhodes in his study, telegrams in his hand. ‘The moment I saw him,’ remembered the minister, ‘I saw a man I had never seen before. His appearance was utterly dejected and different. Before I could say a word, he said “Yes, yes, it is true. Old Jameson has upset my apple-cart... Poor old Jameson. Twenty years we have been friends, now he goes in and ruins me.”’107

In the Raid’s aftermath, Rhodes was at first fêted like a hero in the Cape – but damned in London. He resigned as prime minister in January 1896, to spend a fortune clearing up the mess – some £250,000 on a press fund, legal costs, compensation, ransoms to release prisoners from the Transvaal, including commuting the death sentence on his brother Frank to a fine of £25,000. Hastily, inquiries were convened in both the Cape Parliament and the House of Commons, where, in a committee room off Westminster Hall, the former Cape prime minister was cross-examined. Over five days of questioning, refreshed only by sandwiches and a large tankard of stout, he turned the tables on his interrogators. When the committee finally reported in 1897, Chamberlain, the British Colonial Secretary, was exonerated of complicity, but the raid was condemned and Rhodes was severely censured for misuse of office. In the Cape, Rhodes’s alliance with the Afrikaner Bond was destroyed and his political base dissolved.

It was not, however, a wholesale disaster. His membership of Her Majesty’s Privy Council was not revoked, and neither was the BSAC’s royal charter cancelled. ‘I found all the busmen smiling at me when I came to London,’ said Rhodes, ‘so I knew it was all right.’108 And so he looked to his future with optimism, confiding to a friend: ‘I am confident enough to say that I do not feel that my public career has closed... I am determined still to strive for the closer union of South Africa’.109 He sailed home via Egypt, where he called on Kitchener to secure a consignment of Sudanese donkeys. And it was here he first heard news of the murders of settlers near Bulawayo, where the Ndebele were holding 4,000 residents under siege. Rhodes was in Salisbury by the end of March.

Ever since the battles of 1893, the Ndebele of Rhodesia had suffered; some were forced into labour; others lost their lands. In the spring of 1896, with the BSAC’s leaders distracted by the aftermath of the Jameson Raid, the Ndebele rose in violent revolt. In the summer, the Shona joined them, much to the surprise of the white settlers who believed they treated the tribe comparatively well, often to the chagrin of the Ndebele. The rising was serious – and required force well beyond the compass of the BSAC, and so British troops were deployed to hold the line.

As the costs of conflict multiplied, in October both sides sued for peace and Rhodes now swapped the role of warmonger for peace broker. With considerable personal bravery, he walked unarmed into talks with the Ndebele in the Matopos Hills, and secured both truce and treaty. There was a measure of resettlement, communal tenure and charges of betrayal on all sides. Rhodes’s own conduct brought praise. But it was the beginning of the end of the BSAC’s control of Rhodesia. A Colonial Office report was highly critical of the company’s behaviour and Jameson’s administration, and Rhodes resigned from the BSAC leadership.*24

Happily for him, there was better news in the diamond business, where the market was now rallying, generating for De Beers extraordinary annual dividends of 40 per cent.110 ‘The history of the De Beers Company is simply a fairy tale,’ wrote Lord Rothschild to Rhodes: ‘You have established a practical monopoly of the production of diamonds, you have succeeded in establishing a remarkably steady market for the sale of your productions, and you have succeeded in finding machinery capable of carrying this through.’

Frustrated in Rhodesia, Rhodes sought a new power-base in the Cape. After some persuasion, in 1896 he took the presidency of the South African League, which actively propagandized for British dominance in southern Africa. He created his own cabal in the Parliament, the Progressive Party, which he propped up with money and newspapers, only to fail in the election of 1898 – the dirtiest his contemporaries had ever seen.111 In society, Rhodes was equally adrift, oddly, if not intimately, connected to a Polish princess, Catherine Radziwill, who set herself up in Cape society as his ‘fiancée’ and eventually had to be taken to court for forging his signature.112

Around him, however, the slow slide to all-out war seemed inevitable. Years of friction between the Boers and the British were coming to a head, as the Boers sought to defend their homeland; and the British sought to shield what Joseph Chamberlain called ‘the cornerstone of the whole British colonial system’.113

*

To those looking out from London at the end of the nineteenth century, the Cape was regarded as an indispensable – but imperilled – bridge to India, the land which had become the hub around which Victoria’s global system now turned, the source of force, the balance of trade and a hoard of funds. It was India that provided the British Empire’s reservoir of troops – a mobile force deployable almost anywhere on earth, fielded frequently to overwhelm opponents, from Africa to Asia. As Europe and America raised tariffs to close their markets, cotton exports to India became critically important to Britain; between 1870 and 1913, India rose from third to first place in Britain’s export markets (notably cotton), generating enough foreign earnings to off-set the trade deficit with America. Furthermore, much of India’s overseas trade was in the hands of British shippers and merchants; a third of the Empire trade outside Britain passed through India’s seaports. British capital, too, was ploughed into India: by the 1870s, £100 million had been invested by 50,000 British shareholders in Indian railways, and in the fifty years before the First World War, £286 million was raised on the London Stock Exchange as India rose to become the fourth-largest recipient of British overseas investment. By 1909, Lord Curzon could remark with some justice that India was now ‘the determining influence of every considerable movement in British power to the east and south of the Mediterranean’.114

British policy-makers were, therefore, allergic to the very idea of any French or Russian advance in the Middle East, which was identified as a threat to British interests in India as early as 1800. Safeguarding ‘the passage to India’ therefore became the security strategy that underpinned the creation of a vast armoured zone stretching from Gibraltar to the eastern borders of Persia, the strongest official ‘interest’ in Britain’s world system.115

Soon, ‘Empire’ was a security strategy with the force of political shibboleth. And as Britain’s empire grew, the very concept of ‘Empire’ began to offer a political appeal that won votes for British politicians prepared to follow where entrepreneurs had led. In 1868, the statesman Charles Dilke had ‘followed Britain around the world’, visiting the far-flung corners of the Empire by steamship, inspiring a vision of Greater Britain. Disraeli, too, had spotted the political power of an appeal to Empire, securing in 1876 the title ‘Empress of India’ for Queen Victoria. By 1883, John Robert Seeley, the slightly priggish holder of the Chair of Modern History at Cambridge, produced a best-seller, The Expansion of England, famous for its phrase ‘We seem... to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’, and arguing that ‘Greater Britain’ now required knitting closer together to hold its own against the emerging powers of Germany, Russia and America.

In Joseph Chamberlain, the first ‘self-consciously imperialist politician’, he found an ally. Deeply influenced by a visit to Canada in 1887, where he found settlers far more inclined to an alliance with the United States than with Britain, Chamberlain became determined to forge a path to ‘the uniting together of kindred races with similar objects’, an imperial federation that he sought to forge in practice as colonial secretary in Salisbury’s government.116

Chamberlain epitomized an idea and an ideal soon popularized in novels, verse, painting, advertising and in the music sung on stage and in church. ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’, ‘The Yeomen of England’ were all composed around the turn of the century, echoing the sentiment described by Alfred Austin, the Poet Laureate in 1900: ‘Who dies for England, dies for God... Who dies for England, sleeps with God’. 117 In schools, History was not a compulsory subject until 1900, but patriotic texts such as Deeds That Won the Empire (Fitchett, 1897) or the adventure stories of G. A. Henty (With Wolfe in Canada, 1886, or With Roberts to Pretoria, 1902) sold millions. ‘The depth and volume of public interest in imperial questions’, wrote one Northcliffe employee, is ‘one of the greatest forces, almost untapped, at the disposal of the press’.118

It was not hard, therefore, to persuade British politicians to take a robust approach to guarantee the nation’s ‘interests’ in southern Africa. Bordering the sea lanes to India, Africa was critically important; and politically, there was little harm in defending imperial interests with the force of arms. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the lingering ‘problem’ of southern African began to loom large in London. When the arch-imperialist Lord Milner was appointed Governor of the Cape Colony, it became only a matter of time before British–Boer relations deteriorated. Taking office in 1897, he was known for his view that southern Africa was too small for ‘two absolutely conflicting social and political systems’.119

Milner began ratcheting up the pressure on the South African Republic to grant the Uitlanders – the white, largely British settlers –the right to vote after five years’ residence. It was a cause Rhodes helped to popularize through the work of the South African League, and it now became, in effect, a casus belli. As a campaign for (as Chamberlain acknowledged) ‘Home Rule for the ’Rand’, it was a clear threat to the integrity and independence of Kruger’s Boer republic. The Boers began stocking up on Mauser rifles, Krupp’s artillery and Maxim guns, and over Christmas 1899 Boer forces struck deep into British territory.

For the British, the early months of this South African War (or the Second Anglo-Boer War) were a disaster. Sent in to relieve the Boer siege of Ladysmith, in Natal, General Sir Charles Warren ordered his men to scale Spion Kop on the night of 24 January 1900. When the morning mist lifted, it became clear that his men were sitting ducks. ‘The scenes at Spion Kop’, wrote the young war correspondent Winston Churchill, ‘were among the strangest and most terrible I have ever witnessed... The dead and injured, smashed and broken by shells, littered the summit till it was a bloody reeking shambles.’120

The only respite was the relief of the besieged Mafeking, which at least ended in drama not tragedy. The young Robert Baden-Powell had resolutely held the town, and readers in Britain were treated to 217 days of news about his heroic resistance and morale-raising exercises – cricket matches, dancing, and turns on stage (he was a talented mimic) under the bombardment of the Boer guns. When the siege was relieved on 17 May 1900, there were scenes of almost hysterical jubilation across London.

Slowly, over the summer of 1900, the British Army turned the tide, pioneering a new kind of brutality. Earl Roberts, a veteran of the Indian Army, struck into the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, capturing both Bloemfontein and Pretoria. In the guerrilla war that followed, Kitchener, in search of tactical advantage, devised his ‘scorched earth’ policy, systematically burning Boers’ farms and herding surviving women and children into lethal compounds dubbed ‘concentration’ camps. Nearly 30,000 – one in seven – of the Boer population would die in them, most of them children. But the war divided British public opinion. So often reported in ‘jingoistic’ terms, it soon provoked a moral fury. Britain’s ‘methods of barbarism’, as the Liberal Party leader Campbell-Bannerman described them, sparked outrage at what David Lloyd George encapsulated as ‘a war of extermination... which... will stain the name of this country’. Nevertheless, stained, blood-soaked and a little humbled, the British Empire prevailed, and a new, united nation of South Africa emerged.

*

The man who did more than anyone else to imagine this new country did not, though, live to see it, nor even the formal peace. Cecil Rhodes lived through the Boer siege of Kimberley, but he was now very ill – fat, bloated, and purple-skinned. On 26 March 1902, his doctor stepped outside the idyllic little cottage on the outskirts of Cape Town to tell the world that Rhodes was dead. His last words, said the doctor, were: ‘So little done. So much to do.’121

Had Rhodes died before the ignominy and outrage of the Jameson Raid, his plaudits might have been more fulsome. Now the verdicts were equivocal. The Cape Argus struggled to conclude whether Rhodes was ‘a great man or merely a big man’.122 English newspapers, keen to gain some distance from the war, gave him a send-off without sentiment. They spoke of his service to Empire, his business acumen, his quiet personal life. A few argued against instant judgement.

His body was carried to the Matopos Hills for burial, where Kipling’s eulogy was read out:

Dreamer devout, by vision led

Beyond our guess or reach,

The travail of his spirit bred

Cities in place of speech.

So huge the all-mastering though that drove

So brief the term allowed –

Nations not words he linked to prove

His faith before the crowd.123

Rhodes’s final will left relatively little for his family, but more than £3 million for the Rhodes Trust to fund an Oxford education for fifty-two single men, to be chosen each year from the nations of the British Empire, along with the United States – which Rhodes believed would one day return to the imperial fold.124 Money was left for German students, too, along with funds for his favourite political parties, imperial campaigners and for the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House.125

On 31 May 1902, the Treaty of Vereeniging drew the South African war to its conclusion. Forty-five thousand men had lost their lives, and £250 million had been spent. The two Boer republics were swept into the British Empire. It was a British victory, but in the outrage at the blood, treasure and honour lost in the course of the fighting, voters in Britain sacked the Conservative government and swept the Liberal Party back into power in January 1906, after a two-decade absence, with a 243 majority.

The British paid huge compensation for damages. Under the new constitutional arrangements, Boers’ voting rights were confirmed – but the rights of non-whites were not assured. Within a decade, Afrikaners, who now made up the majority of voting South Africans, elected their commandant-general in the war, Louis Botha, premier of a new, self-governing British dominion, the Union of South Africa, which in 1910 brought together the Cape, Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

In 1860, when Rhodes had been a young boy, the British Empire enfolded some 9.5 million square miles of land. By 1909, it had grown by a third to cover a quarter of the world’s land surface, home to 444 million people;*25 it was an empire enveloping, in the words of the St James Gazette, ‘one continent, a hundred peninsulas, five hundred promontories, a thousand lakes, two thousand rivers, ten thousand islands’.126 It was acquired, not in ‘a fit of absence of mind’, but by deliberate, determined political and commercial entrepreneurs. And few were more important than Cecil Rhodes.

*1 By 1910, South Africa enjoyed £227 million in FDI from the UK. See T. A. B. Corley, ‘Britain’s Overseas Investments in 1914 Revisited’, Business History, Vol. 36, January 1994.

*2 The BBP was dissolved when a border strip of Bechuanaland was transferred to the British South Africa Company on 18 October 1895, and its men were freed to enlist in the BSAC police. See Elizabeth Longford, Jameson’s Raid: The Prelude to the Boer War (Littlehampton, 1982), p. 60.

*3 The former BBP troops joined a combined force known to contemporaries as the Rhodesian Mounted Police. See Ash, The If Man, op. cit., p. 224.

*4 Francis Rhodes boasted descent from a long line of Midland and Cheshire business people; his great-grandfather had owned a great brick and tile works in Dalston.

*5 Australia was annexed in 1824–29 and Western Canada in 1859–70. In India, imperial control was asserted over the Maratha territories, Assam, southern Burma, Mysore, Sind, Punjab, Jhansi and Oudh.

*6 James Watt of Birmingham supplied the engines for the steamer and Robert Stephenson advised on the launch. There was no bigger ship for another forty-nine years. When it proved too big for commercial success as a passenger liner, it was redeployed laying submarine cables.

*7 The Royal Adventurers were reconstituted as the Royal African Company in 1672.

*8 These rivals included R. Graham, Dunsmure, Alderson, Stow and English, and other lesser-known De Beers claims-holders.

*9 The law now allowed entrapment of individuals suspected in trading in illicit diamonds, police searches without warrants, and assumed guilt until innocence was proven. Only a proposal for public flogging did not quite make it to the final draft.

*10 Boer mercenaries had intervened in tribal conflicts in 1882, taking up arms on behalf of Tswana chiefs, and in the process declared the two small republics of Stellaland and Goshen. See Thomas, Rhodes, pp. 135–6.

*11 In fact, more than 40 per cent of shipping tonnage was in the hands of just eight firms. See Stephen Broadberry, Market Services and the Productivity Race, 1850–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 148.

*12 By 1881, the Bank’s reserve was just 14 per cent of the combined British, French, German and US treasury totals.

*13 This is an average observed by Geoffrey Jones on a sample of great firms between 1895 and 1914. Jones, Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the 19th and 20th Centuries (OUP, 2000), p. 82.

*14 With the exception of Lancashire and southern Scotland, manufacturers were four times more likely to invest in a domestic business. However, between 1900 and 1910, government bonds earned under 4 per cent while a blue-chip foreign bond could make over 5 per cent.

*15 This represented some 4–5 per cent of GNP.

*16 ‘Never before or since,’ wrote the historian Michael Edelstein, ‘has one nation committed so much of is national income and savings to capital formation abroad.’ Edelstein, ‘Foreign Investment, Accumulation and Empire’, in Floyd and Johnson (eds), Cambridge Economic History, op. cit., pp. 194–5.

*17 With the exception of Lancashire and southern Scotland, manufacturers were four times more likely to invest in a domestic business. However, between 1900 and 1910, government bonds earned under 4 per cent while a blue-chip foreign bond could make over 5 per cent.

*18 ‘Debenture stock’ was a bond – or loan – contract specifying to return borrowed funds, along with interest, secured on the company property.

*19 So convinced was Rhodes that Rothschild would support him, that he changed his will in June 1888 to bequeath him his fortune.

*20 They wanted a charter for a British Imperial Central Africa Company.

*21 White people would not be allowed to live on the land – the strict separation of the races was supported by the Bond – and those who owned property in the Glen Grey area were excluded from the franchise. This highly regulated area was one of Rhodes’s greatest attempts at controlling the black African labour force.

*22 Even before the Letters Patent granting a Royal Charter of Incorporation was sealed by the Queen on 29 October 1889, Rhodes was trying to hand over a cheque for £30,000 for a new telegraph from Mafeking. William, Cecil Rhodes, op. cit., p. 137.

*23 Lord Rothschild had spotted the weapon’s potential in 1884; he financed Maxim’s merger with Nordenfelt Guns.

*24 The 1896–97 conflict is now generally known as the First Chimurenga, or the Second Matabele War.

*25 Yet in 1898, the costs of defence, including the thirty-three barracks and coaling stations dotted around the world, was but £40 million – just 2.5 per cent of net national product. See Ferguson, Empire, op. cit., p. 245.