Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

HISTORY:CECIL JOHN RHODES (1853-1902), the son of an English clergyman, amassed a great personal fortune by dominating the world market in rough diamonds and vastly extended Britain's African empire by diplomacy, commercial acumen and force of arms - or, as Philip Ziegler, the eminent historian, critically suggests, by "bribery, chicanery and ruthless bullying", writes Patrick Skene Catling.

De Beers, the company Rhodes founded to develop the diamond mines of Kimberley, once produced almost all the world's diamonds. A military campaign he instigated against the native Matabele armies gained "a mass of land the size of Spain, France and the Low Countries, and containing nearly a hundred separate, hardly consulted, peoples speaking seventy languages". Two countries, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, were named after him. Exploiting the labour of black Africans, whom, he said, should be treated as children, he became very rich indeed.