Rhodes And His Banker: Empire, Wealth And The Coming Of Union, by Richard Steyn.

Rhodes And His Banker: Empire, Wealth And The Coming Of Union, by Richard Steyn. Jonathan Ball Publishers. Johannesburg, South Africa 2024. ISBN 9781776193882 / ISBN 978-1-77-619388-2

Rhodes And His Banker: Empire, Wealth And The Coming Of Union, by Richard Steyn. No individual has had a greater influence on the early political and economic fortunes of South Africa than Cecil John Rhodes.

Richard Steyn  

[...] To this day, historians continue to argue over his motives in trying simultaneously to advance the British Empire's interests in Africa, on the one hand, and to unify South Africa's four diverse and unequal colonies, on the other. That the Standard Bank became the country's biggest bank by the turn of the century must be ascribed to the quality of two of the men who had guided its fortunes since 1864. One was a Scot, Robert Stewart, its first General Manager, who ran the Bank for 11 of its earliest years, during which he grasped the opportunity (and took the risk) of opening on the diamond fields, and in so doing made the Standard the leading bank in the country. The other was Lewis Michell, who built upon and expanded Stewart's legacy. Lewis Michell, an adventurous young Cornishman, had been trained as a bank clerk in London before being sent out to the eastern Cape in the early 1860s at the height of the worldwide wool boom. Resigning after a few years of service from the stuffy institution that had dispatched him to a distant colonial outpost, he joined the Standard Bank and was instrumental in expanding it into southern Africa's leading financial institution in the years before and during the second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). In so doing, his path inevitably crossed that of Rhodes, the most famous (and to many, most notorious) empire-builder of the late Victorian era. Keeping his distance at first, Michell eventually fell under the spell of Rhodes, whom he came to regard as 'a great man, great even in his faults'. During his stellar career in banking and for many years after Rhodes's early death, Michell worked unceasingly to perpetuate his client's legacy in South Africa and neighbouring Rhodesia. On Rhodes's death in 1902, the Standard Bank's head kept a promise he had made, retired from banking and spent the rest of his long life promoting, protecting and defending his late hero's legacy. He wrote one of the first of many biographies of the man aptly nicknamed 'the Colossus', succeeded Rhodes as chairman of De Beers Consolidated Mines, the world's biggest diamond company, and served for many years as a director of the British South Africa Company BSAC. As an executor and member of the Rhodes Trust, he also played a key role in setting up its world-famous Rhodes Scholarship programme, which continues more than a century later to attract to Oxford University some of the best and brightest young men and women. Unusually for a busy banker, for most of his life Michell was a diligent diarist and letter writer, combining notes and reminiscences into a lengthy and at times rambling autobiography that was never fully published. At the Standard Bank, he came into regular contact with every leading South African and imperial politician of his day, faithfully recording his impressions and chronicling his experiences in his adopted country for more than half a century. Having an interest in South African history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I have long been intrigued by how one small island race off the coast of Europe could rule a quarter of the world by remote control, and how men such as Rhodes and Michell were able to impose their imperialist credo upon the people of southern Africa, with consequences both positive and negative. [...]

This is an excerpt from Rhodes And His Banker: Empire, Wealth And The Coming Of Union, by Richard Steyn.

Title: Rhodes And His Banker
Subtitle: Empire, Wealth And The Coming Of Union
Author: Richard Steyn
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Johannesburg, South Africa 2024
ISBN 9781776193882 / ISBN 978-1-77-619388-2
Softcover, 15 x 23 cm, 300 pages, several b/w images, text in English