ABSTRACT
Interpretations of C.J. Rhodes’s career as a businessman and entrepreneur are heavy with ascribed motivations but light on analysis of his day-to-day mining company operations and relations with business associates who worked with him between the 1870s and the 1890s. Rhodes became a cult figure in his lifetime, and though he fell from grace in 1895-96, he remained the darling of both the imperial Liberals and the Conservatives. The first biographers-W.T. Stead, Sir Lewis Michell, Basil Williams-preserved him as an imperial icon of British supremacy in South Africa, the amalgamator of mines, founder of De Beers Consolidated Mines and the Consolidated Gold Fields, creator of the two Rhodesias, the South African League and its Progressive party, and benefactor of the Rhodes Trust. Some revisionist work by William Plomer and Felix Gross discovered “fatal flaws”, but this did not really shake the image, preserved by J.G. Lockhart and C.M. Woodhouse, of a unique and purposeful creator of any enterprise he took in hand-a South African “Colossus”. Not even John Flint who produced a more balanced statement on Rhodes was able to supply much on his business career. The most durable verdict, until the publication of a vastly expanded account by Robert Rotberg, remained that of John X. Merriman, Cape premier and a founder of the Union, who classified Rhodes as “a sort of colonial Walpole” who fell victim to stock jobbers and made his money in a fit of absence of mind.1 But the unresolved question preventing fuller understanding of Rhodes the sub-imperialist politician remained a task for historians of Rhodes’s business activities and the companies he helped to create.
