race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in temper, but still have the firmness to govern, and the grace to obey…we are rich in an inheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through a thousand years of noble history…
And this is what she [Britain] must either do, or perish: she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men; – seizing every fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country, and that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea….8
Some authors have claimed that Ruskin cast a spell over his eager disciple, Cecil Rhodes. The latter's connections with Ruskin, however, were probably slight or nonexistent.9 Moreover, Rhodes did not need to pick up such ideas directly from Ruskin, for similar notions were, almost literally, in the air – especially at Oxford. The university was one of the fountainheads of the spirit of “New Imperialism” that pervaded not only England but also France, Germany, Belgium, the United States, and other western powers from the 1870s until the First World War. Although rabid imperialists made up only a minority of the dons and students in Oxford, they were extremely vocal.10 Oxford graduates made up a disproportionate number of the men who staffed the colonial service in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. In addition to Ruskin, one of their chief spokesmen was Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College from 1870 to 1893. Jowett often preached that he wanted to “inoculate” the world with Balliol men and “govern the world through my pupils.”11
The motives and accomplishments of western imperialists of that era look suspect, if not downright evil, to us today. When Ruskin, Jowett, the mature Rhodes and others spoke of the “superior” British race and its need to expand by taking land from “inferior” races, we might today be struck by their similarities to Hitler. He too spoke of a master race and its need for “living space.” But the late nineteenth-century champions of empire never proposed the extermination of entire races of “inferior” peoples. Given the circumstances and the mentality of that period, the vast majority of the politicians, clergymen, business leaders, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens thought what they were doing was right.
Why did the British, French, Americans, and others rush to gain colonies, protectorates, and spheres of influence in all those parts of the world where they had not already gained control? There was a combination of factors. The major Western countries were the only ones that had entered into the Industrial Revolution by the late nineteenth century. This gave them the economic and military power to enforce their wills on “backward” societies. It also created a need to find additional markets around the world for their finished products and new sources of raw materials. The rapid economic growth of the major European powers and the United States likewise seemed to be a sign from God that Western civilization and Christianity were superior to all other cultures and religions. Added to this was Social Darwinism. Charles Darwin himself rejected the extension of his theories from biology to human history, but Herbert Spencer and many other philosophers and social scientists had no such misgivings. Social Darwinism permitted them to believe that the West not only had “might” but that this was “right.” Europeans and Americans had no reason to apologize for their “superiority.” The survival of the fittest was in the laws of nature instituted by God. Africans, Asians, and islanders in the Caribbean and Pacific would benefit from exposure to Western ideas and customs.
There were a few vehement critics of New Imperialism. Mark Twain bitterly attacked the American acquisition of the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. He pilloried the high-sounding motives of the United States government as mere camouflage hiding naked conquest. In his book Imperialism, published in 1902, British author J.A. Hobson argued that the only people to benefit from empire were big businessmen in the mother countries. Quite prophetically he said that competition for empire would also lead to war between the major powers.12
The overwhelming majority of Europeans and Americans were staunch imperialists at least until the First World War. In 1899 Rudyard Kipling penned his poem “White Man's Burden,” written to urge the United States to acquire the Philippines. Young white men sent out to the colonies, said Kipling, were going into exile, where they served their “captives' need” rather than gaining wealth or fame for themselves. Native peoples, according to the poem, were wild, sullen, half-devil, half-child. As late as 1910, in its classic eleventh edition, the Encyclopedia Britannica claimed that the Vietnamese were “the worst-built and ugliest of all the Indo-Chinese who belong to the Mongolian race”; that Negroes were “easy going” and had no real hair, only wool; that “the Chinese character is inferior to the European”; that Haitians were “ignorant and lazy”; that Filipinos were “physical weaklings…with large clumsy feet”; and that Afghans were cruel and crafty.13
The First World War punctured inflated Western notions of self-importance and supremacy. The so-called rational West, with its elevated sense of fair play, its Christianity, and its economic progress, very nearly blew itself to smithereens. France, Britain, Germany, and several other countries were devastated economically, socially, and psychologically by the war. As a result of the carnage, the “roaring” Twenties was more a decade of disillusionment and anxiety than of prosperity or joy. These doubts about Western supremacy lay in the future, however, well beyond the life span of Cecil Rhodes.
In 1881 young Rhodes achieved two important goals: he won election to a seat in the all-white Cape Colony parliament and obtained his Oxford degree. Over the next fourteen years his exploits brought him not only enviable wealth and political power but also international notoriety. He would retain his parliamentary seat until his death. His business affairs included the manufacture and sale of ice, ice cream, and water pumps (necessities in mining). Through the early and mid-1880s, working with two partners, he ruthlessly bought out all of his rivals in the Kimberley mines. By the end of the decade his company, De Beers Consolidated Mining, controlled more than 90 percent of the world's diamond production. (Today the company still supplies over 80 percent.) In 1889 Rhodes obtained a royal charter for his British South Africa Company, which gave him almost unlimited authority to explore and settle the vast territories that he named Rhodesia. (In 1964 Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, and in 1980 Southern Rhodesia achieved independence as Zimbabwe.) He was also instrumental in Britain's acquisition of Bechuanaland (Botswana) and Nyasaland (Malawi). He nearly succeeded in wresting Mozambique from the Portuguese and the Congo (Zaire) from King Leopold of the Belgians. Once he bragged that he would annex the planets if he could. Altogether his acquisitions for the British Empire were equal in size to Western Europe (including Britain and Ireland). He almost achieved his goal of extending British control from the Cape to Cairo.
Meanwhile Rhodes expanded both his business and his political activities. After gold was discovered in the Transvaal's Witwatersrand in 1886, Rhodes formed the Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa Company and won a large percentage of that industry. In 1890 he was appointed prime minister of the Cape of Good Hope Colony. Over the next five years he worked further to subdue the native tribes and to develop a modus vivendi with the Dutch.14
Until 1895 his career trajectory pointed ever upward. But then the infamous Jameson Raid brought a disgrace that would hound him until his premature death. Dr. Leander Starr Jameson was one of Rhodes' closest and most reliable associates. Rhodes entrusted him with engineering a secret raid into the Transvaal. The goal was to spark an uprising in Johannesburg that would topple the independent Dutch government of Paul Kruger. The result would be the elimination of any obstacles to Rhodes' control of the gold mines, plus the expansion of British control. The raid was a fiasco, with Jameson and many of his men being captured. Both at that time and today scholars debate the question of how much Rhodes and the British government in London knew about the raid in advance. Undoubtedly they knew its general outline, but whether they had tried to cancel or delay it remains shrouded in conflicting and vanished evidence.
At any rate, as prime minister in the Cape Rhodes was blamed for the debacle. He was forced to resign from office and
