• Complain

Robert I. Rotberg - The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power

Here you can read online Robert I. Rotberg - The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 1988, publisher: Oxford University Press, USA, genre: Non-fiction / History. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover
  • Book:
    The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Oxford University Press, USA
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    1988
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Cecil Rhodes was an imposing figure, tall, robust-looking, with a leonine head, a man so charismatic that one contemporary claimed that belief in Rhodes was a substitute for religion. But he was certainly a man of contradictions. He was a dreamy idealist whose favorite book was The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and a ruthless businessman whose guiding principle was every man has his price. He supported invidious racial laws in South Africa, and invented and sponsored the world-renowned Rhodes Scholarships. Though his own education and intellectual talents were unprepossessing, he dominated the British Empire and became one of the leading figures in the English-speaking world, the confidant of Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm, and a man of vast wealth and world-wide influence.
Based on seventeen years of research, this monumental volume offers the definitive biography of one of the most controversial figures of the nineteenth century. Rhodes was truly larger than life, and this book captures that life in fascinating detail. It offers an astute portrait of Rhodes childhood and adolescence, informed by insights from modern psychology; it vividly depicts life on a nineteenth-century African cotton farm (Rhodes first venture) and in mining camps around Kimberley and the Witwatersrand; it traces the surreptitious stock buyouts and mergers that allowed Rhodes to gain control over 90% of the worlds diamond production by age thirty-five; it describes his campaigns against African populations that allowed him to establish Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia); and it discusses the poorly planned, disastrous raid on the Transvaal that destroyed Rhodes reputation.
A conqueror and colonial monarch, Cecil Rhodes presided arrogantly over the fate of southern Africa. But he also built lasting economic institutions, furthered transportation and communication links, improved agriculture, and fervently believed that he used his wealth and power to advance the best interests of the British Empire and Africa. This biography illuminates a complex and fascinating life, a life both evil and good.

Robert I. Rotberg: author's other books


Who wrote The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
THE FOUNDER
THE FOUNDER

Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power

ROBERT I. ROTBERG

WITH THE COLLABORATION OF
MILES F. SHORE

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras - photo 1

Oxford University Press

Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Melbourne Auckland

and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan

Copyright 1988 by Robert I. Rotberg

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rotberg, Robert I.
The founder: Cecil Rhodes and the pursuit of power / Robert I. Rotberg.
p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-504968-3
1. Rhodes, Cecil, 18531902. 2. StatesmenAfrica, SouthernBiography.
3. Capitalists and financiersAfrica, SouthernBiography.
I. Title.
DT776.R4R66 1988
968.04'092'4dc19 88-5960 CIP

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

For
my parents

The Grandest Opportunities
A Preface

THE AGENDA WAS defined a decade ago: A biography [of Rhodes] adequate for historians of Africa or of imperialism and a biography in its own right has yet to be written. A wise critic, Jeffrey Butler desired a study which would bring together Rhodes the businessman and Rhodes the politician, Rhodes the creator and ruler of Rhodesia and Rhodes the Cape politician; Rhodes the South African and Rhodes the actor in English politics and money markets; and perhaps above all, Rhodes the formulator of native policy. The major unfinished business for biographers, he suggested, lay in producing a portrait that was psychologically convincing, giving appropriate weight to the favorable and unfavorable aspects of his personality and conduct. Cornelis W. de Kiewiet, who masterfully synthesized the history of South Africa, had earlier written that Rhodes was not one man, but several men who blended their dissimilar and incongruous traits into a firm and successful union. The biographer [had not appeared who could] do justice to the contradictions of the loftiness to which he could rise and the baseness to which he could stoop. Why and how Rhodes proved so creative and effective in all his multifarious pursuits are key questions, and the driving ones of this new biography.

Rudyard Kipling warned, however, that Rhodess personality would be a very difficult thing to translate to a man who did not know him well. That may be why Anthony Sampson, one of the ablest of recent writers, believes that the character of Rhodeswith his combination of shrewdness and adolescence, romanticism and ruthlessness, imagination and vulgarityhas eluded all his biographers. For the same reason Geoffrey Wheatcroft, concluding his study of The Randlords, felt that a satisfactory life of Rhodes is still to seek. For him, and doubtless for many others, the looming gap between [Rhodes] deeds and his unfathomable personality remains.

Part of the problem is that Rhodes wrote no revealing letters to his loved ones. If his own speeches were the only guide, he would emerge omniscient and prescient, with the rough edges sanded round and smooth. He copied favorite sayings from classical authorities, but a manparticularly Rhodesis more than the sum of appealing aphorisms. His commonplace books and jotting notebooks help a little, but nowhere are there recorded intimacies. Neville Pickering, in whom Rhodes may have confided, died young and inexperienced. Sir Leander Starr Jameson and Sir Charles Metcalfe lived on after Rhodes and were talkative, but they loyally protected Rhodes memory. Like so many of Rhodes less central contemporaries, Jameson and Metcalfe helped embroider a past that had been reworked systematically by Rhodes himself.

Rhodes psyche is not the sole puzzle, however, for after many years of thinking about, researching, and preparing to write a long-planned interpretive biography of the Founder, I realized that Rhodes was unlike any of the lives I had earlier examined or written about. In half or two-thirds of a normal lifetime, Rhodes had accomplished far more than most of the empire builders, corporate tycoons, and political giants of the nineteenth century. He had made a fortune, carved out countries, and governed an old colony and two new ones. He was not merely an important overseas figure in the heady last decades of Victorian aggrandizement, but a major actor in Europe as well. It is no accident that his name lives on through the gift of his scholarships. Nor is it surprising that his memory still occasions bitter controversy. Rhodes was great and good, despite his flaws, say his supporters (as they did in his lifetime). Rhodes was despicable and exceptionally evila true roguesay his detractors. (One of the last, more muddleheaded than most, many years ago even argued that writing a biography of Rhodes was wrong. We should not write about bad men!)

Was Rhodes essentially good? Was he a true benefactor who, despite defects of method, not only meant well but also contributedas he intended to the betterment of mankind in Africa? Or, as critics have suggested, was he predominantly a devious power-monger who wanted riches and glory for himself, and deliberately destroyed other individuals, other cultures, and more promising initiatives as he cut his wide way through Africa? Choosing between or reconciling these two views, put only mildly here, is what a biography of Rhodes ultimately should be about. But to compile a balance sheet, and to draw an overall conclusion, turns out to have been too simple a charge.

What I discovered, and what the reader will also discover, is that Rhodes cannot be encompassed or revealed in one dimension. Rhodes achieved as much as he did because his energy and vision were greater than those of his contemporaries. He was involved on a daily basis in more initiatives, more schemes, and more dreams than most of us can juggle (or even encompass) in weeks, if not months. His pursuits were myriad, interactive, tangled, little recorded, and of a high and important order. In a word which cannot fully convey the sense of what Rhodes did and thought, his life was complex. He thought about many endeavors simultaneously, and carried within himself and in his head at all times the germs and the details of projects small and large which were by turns practical and improbable, ideal and sordid, and generous and ruthless. It is less that Rhodes personality was enigmatic than that it was magnificently multifaceted. He was larger than life, and the favor and enmity that his name still evokes are appropriate responses.

For all those reasons, it became clear that the Founder required a wholly new, complete biography which would incorporate a detailed examination of Rhodes personality. In order to comprehend Rhodes, everything that he touched, influenced, meddled with, created, and destroyed had to be understood. A new biography had to examine his philosophy, his life style, his sexual preferences, his relations with others, and his compassion or lack of compassion. It had to measure his impact on his age, on the country of his birth and on his several adopted countries, and on such epochal events as the consolidation of diamond mining, the extraction of gold, the start of the Anglo-Boer War, and, implicitly, todays bitterly divided South Africa. It had to articulate why a man of crowned glory involved himself so unnecessarily in an exercise as destructive and treacherous as the Jameson Raid. Why did the same man who went unprotected into the Matopos mountains to make peace with the warring Ndebele also behave with callous contempt toward the political rights of Africans in the Cape Colony? Jane Waterston, a missionary doctor, prayed that he might be delivered from being one of those to whom the grandest opportunities have been given by Providence & who flung them away. She believed that he could have success in every right waythat he could be the conqueror of Rhodesia as well as the great chief that ruled the many thousands of natives wisely & well. Since Rhodes himself always believed that he could be the man whom Waterston wanted, indeed that he

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power»

Look at similar books to The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.