What do you think?
Rate this book
The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes
This is the first comprehensive biography of Cecil Rhodes in a generation. This critical work elaborates the life and times of Rhodes, showing how his racist politics impacted mining, industry, transportation, warfare, and society, while discussing how his controversial policies fueled a lasting white-dominated colonial society and had an enduring influence on modern South Africa.
Cecil John Rhodes became one of the most influential people in the history of the British Empire. He made a fortune in South Africa by leading the world's most important diamond mining company, De Beers, as well as a gold-mining concern called Consolidated Gold Fields. While he was a busy entrepreneur, he was also a member of the Cape Colony's legislature and served as prime minister from 1890 to 1896, a key period for the development of racial discrimination. His British South Africa Company was given a charter to govern what is today Zambia and Zimbabwe. His most famous legacy is the Rhodes Trust, which funds the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford University.
A complex figure, admired and detested in his own time, Rhodes dreamt to unite Southern Africa's colonies and republics into one state, dominated by white settlers, with labor provided by Black people who were constrained and pressured by discriminatory laws. He built his wealth on the backs of African migrant laborers, for whom he had little regard. His British South Africa Company was accused of fraud. And in 1895 and 1896, he famously encouraged a failed plot to overthrow the independent Boer republic in the Transvaal. Rhodes' coup helped to precipitate the South African War, which started in 1899 and ended in 1902, the year of Rhodes' death.
This authoritative biography focuses on the relationship between Rhodes' well-known activities in business and politics and the development of Southern Africa's infrastructure, most famously his plan for a Cape-to-Cairo railway. Rhodes envisioned a region where racism became embedded in the mining, farming, communication, and transportation industries. He pursued this vision in the face of opposition from many quarters. Understanding the extent of Rhodes' activities helps us to understand the challenges of modern Africa and the recent Rhodes Must Fall movement. A critical analysis of this contested figure, The Colonialist offers an original portrait of a crucial figure of his era.
Cecil John Rhodes became one of the most influential people in the history of the British Empire. He made a fortune in South Africa by leading the world's most important diamond mining company, De Beers, as well as a gold-mining concern called Consolidated Gold Fields. While he was a busy entrepreneur, he was also a member of the Cape Colony's legislature and served as prime minister from 1890 to 1896, a key period for the development of racial discrimination. His British South Africa Company was given a charter to govern what is today Zambia and Zimbabwe. His most famous legacy is the Rhodes Trust, which funds the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford University.
A complex figure, admired and detested in his own time, Rhodes dreamt to unite Southern Africa's colonies and republics into one state, dominated by white settlers, with labor provided by Black people who were constrained and pressured by discriminatory laws. He built his wealth on the backs of African migrant laborers, for whom he had little regard. His British South Africa Company was accused of fraud. And in 1895 and 1896, he famously encouraged a failed plot to overthrow the independent Boer republic in the Transvaal. Rhodes' coup helped to precipitate the South African War, which started in 1899 and ended in 1902, the year of Rhodes' death.
This authoritative biography focuses on the relationship between Rhodes' well-known activities in business and politics and the development of Southern Africa's infrastructure, most famously his plan for a Cape-to-Cairo railway. Rhodes envisioned a region where racism became embedded in the mining, farming, communication, and transportation industries. He pursued this vision in the face of opposition from many quarters. Understanding the extent of Rhodes' activities helps us to understand the challenges of modern Africa and the recent Rhodes Must Fall movement. A critical analysis of this contested figure, The Colonialist offers an original portrait of a crucial figure of his era.
528 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 2025
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
Read
August 4, 2025He was a polarising figure, revered by his admirers as a patriotic hero yet reviled by others for his egotism and amorality. At least one journalist thought he had a ‘vein of vulgarity’, exemplified by ‘a passion for diamonds and a contempt for women’. This powerful man was susceptible to ‘flattery of the grosser kind’ and showed ‘a tendency to bully those who were in no position to retaliate’. He was guilty, too, of ‘racial arrogance’. His peculiar brand of charisma worked by converting conspicuously bad behaviour into a display of dominance. ‘We have always a weakness’, Edward Roffe Thompson wrote, ‘for the strong man who shows his strength by smashing the Ten Commandments’.
Cecil Rhodes as the Donald Trump of the late 19th century: the analogy is less outlandish than it might seem. Representing a disruptive combination of wealth, celebrity, and megalomania, Rhodes mixed business with politics and conflated territorial conquest with personal aggrandisement. The Trump that returned to power for a second term has been increasingly Rhodes-like in his fixation on enlarging the boundaries of the United States, and in his view of land inhabited by other people as inert repositories of extractable resources. Like Rhodes, oddly, Trump reveres the British monarchy while disdaining almost every other institution. Despite its hostility to immigration, the Trump administration has rolled out the red carpet for the population most beloved by Rhodes, the white minority of South Africa. The Trumpist magnates who grew up in South Africa, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, are even more indebted to Rhodes’ technologically sophisticated, surveillance-intensive, and militarised brand of capitalism. Of course, there are significant differences, too; Rhodes saw the accumulation of wealth as a means to the ultimate goal of imperial expansion rather than the other way around. Still, one of the frustrations of William Kelleher Storey’s thorough but unfocused biography is that it holds back from acknowledging the troubling connections between Rhodes’ world and our own, even when they leap off the page.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Erik Linstrum is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and author of Age of Emergency: Living With Violence at the End of the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Cecil Rhodes as the Donald Trump of the late 19th century: the analogy is less outlandish than it might seem. Representing a disruptive combination of wealth, celebrity, and megalomania, Rhodes mixed business with politics and conflated territorial conquest with personal aggrandisement. The Trump that returned to power for a second term has been increasingly Rhodes-like in his fixation on enlarging the boundaries of the United States, and in his view of land inhabited by other people as inert repositories of extractable resources. Like Rhodes, oddly, Trump reveres the British monarchy while disdaining almost every other institution. Despite its hostility to immigration, the Trump administration has rolled out the red carpet for the population most beloved by Rhodes, the white minority of South Africa. The Trumpist magnates who grew up in South Africa, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, are even more indebted to Rhodes’ technologically sophisticated, surveillance-intensive, and militarised brand of capitalism. Of course, there are significant differences, too; Rhodes saw the accumulation of wealth as a means to the ultimate goal of imperial expansion rather than the other way around. Still, one of the frustrations of William Kelleher Storey’s thorough but unfocused biography is that it holds back from acknowledging the troubling connections between Rhodes’ world and our own, even when they leap off the page.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Erik Linstrum is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and author of Age of Emergency: Living With Violence at the End of the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2023).
January 22, 2026
Cecil John Rhodes was undeniably a colossal force in South African history, regardless of the lens through which one chooses to read or write about him. Despite this American author’s contemporary liberal perspective and, at times, excessive detail, I found the biography insightful and informative, shedding light on a period of South African history that has been actively obscured by today’s prevailing local political narrative.
February 3, 2026
A man of his time really. I hope there is more men like him, with his ambition, with his drive, with his whit. If there was 50 Cecil Rhodes they could run the world
September 2, 2026
Cecil Rhodes was a name I knew from history lessons, and from the famous caricature of him straddling Africa, symbolising his imperial “Cape to Cairo” ambition. For years, that image was probably my most immediate association with Rhodes.
The Colonialist encourages the reader to look beyond that caricature and to understand the man and the ideology behind it.
Rhodes was not simply a wealthy mining magnate who happened to enter politics. One of the book’s strengths is the way it brings together the different dimensions of his life, his economic success, political ambitions and imperial vision, and shows how deeply intertwined they were. Rhodes thought on an extraordinary scale. He did not merely want to accumulate wealth; he wanted to use wealth and political power to shape the future of southern Africa and, ultimately, the wider African continent.
The Cape-to-Cairo vision captures this ambition particularly well. Rhodes imagined British influence stretching across Africa, linking British territories from the south to the north. Viewed through the eyes of a nineteenth-century imperialist, this could be framed as a grand project of political unity, economic development and “civilisation.” But the book makes clear that such language cannot be separated from the ideology underpinning Rhodes’s worldview.
His political career was inseparable from the expansion of British power in southern Africa. His role in the colonisation of territories that would eventually bear his name demonstrates that his imperial ambitions were not abstract ideas. They had concrete political and territorial consequences.
More troubling still was the racial ideology at the heart of his imperialism. Rhodes held a profound belief in British and Anglo-Saxon superiority. The expansion of British power was therefore not simply a geopolitical project. It was rooted in a worldview that regarded some peoples as more advanced, capable and entitled to exercise political power than others. This is essential to understanding Rhodes because it reminds us that his vision of Africa was ultimately a vision in which Africans themselves had little agency.
Rhodes was undoubtedly visionary in the scale of his ambition. He possessed an unusual ability to think beyond his immediate circumstances and to translate ideas into economic institutions, political influence and territorial expansion. That combination of wealth, ambition and political imagination is part of what made him such a consequential figure.
What I found particularly important in reading about Rhodes was the extent to which imperialism was not something that merely happened around him. It was central to what he wanted to achieve. His wealth was a means of acquiring influence; his political career became an instrument for advancing imperial interests; and his imperial vision was inseparable from the racial assumptions of his time.
The book provides a useful lens through which to think about the enduring legacy of colonialism in southern Africa and the continuing debates over whether historical figures such as Rhodes should be remembered, celebrated, criticized or reassessed.
The book is particularly valuable for readers interested in southern African history, British imperialism, the formation of modern South Africa, or the continuing debate over Rhodes’s legacy.
The Colonialist encourages the reader to look beyond that caricature and to understand the man and the ideology behind it.
Rhodes was not simply a wealthy mining magnate who happened to enter politics. One of the book’s strengths is the way it brings together the different dimensions of his life, his economic success, political ambitions and imperial vision, and shows how deeply intertwined they were. Rhodes thought on an extraordinary scale. He did not merely want to accumulate wealth; he wanted to use wealth and political power to shape the future of southern Africa and, ultimately, the wider African continent.
The Cape-to-Cairo vision captures this ambition particularly well. Rhodes imagined British influence stretching across Africa, linking British territories from the south to the north. Viewed through the eyes of a nineteenth-century imperialist, this could be framed as a grand project of political unity, economic development and “civilisation.” But the book makes clear that such language cannot be separated from the ideology underpinning Rhodes’s worldview.
His political career was inseparable from the expansion of British power in southern Africa. His role in the colonisation of territories that would eventually bear his name demonstrates that his imperial ambitions were not abstract ideas. They had concrete political and territorial consequences.
More troubling still was the racial ideology at the heart of his imperialism. Rhodes held a profound belief in British and Anglo-Saxon superiority. The expansion of British power was therefore not simply a geopolitical project. It was rooted in a worldview that regarded some peoples as more advanced, capable and entitled to exercise political power than others. This is essential to understanding Rhodes because it reminds us that his vision of Africa was ultimately a vision in which Africans themselves had little agency.
Rhodes was undoubtedly visionary in the scale of his ambition. He possessed an unusual ability to think beyond his immediate circumstances and to translate ideas into economic institutions, political influence and territorial expansion. That combination of wealth, ambition and political imagination is part of what made him such a consequential figure.
What I found particularly important in reading about Rhodes was the extent to which imperialism was not something that merely happened around him. It was central to what he wanted to achieve. His wealth was a means of acquiring influence; his political career became an instrument for advancing imperial interests; and his imperial vision was inseparable from the racial assumptions of his time.
The book provides a useful lens through which to think about the enduring legacy of colonialism in southern Africa and the continuing debates over whether historical figures such as Rhodes should be remembered, celebrated, criticized or reassessed.
The book is particularly valuable for readers interested in southern African history, British imperialism, the formation of modern South Africa, or the continuing debate over Rhodes’s legacy.
August 27, 2026
William Kelleher Storey’s The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes offers a critical and deeply revealing examination of one of the most consequential and controversial figures in the history of the British Empire. Rather than presenting Cecil Rhodes simply as an ambitious businessman or imperial visionary, Storey examines the connections between Rhodes’s economic power, political ambitions, racial ideology, and the broader development of colonial Southern Africa.
What struck me most about the book is the way it connects Rhodes’s personal ambitions with the larger structures of colonial society. Rhodes accumulated enormous wealth through diamond and gold mining, but Storey makes clear that this wealth cannot be separated from the systems of labor, racial discrimination, and political power that supported his enterprises.
I was particularly interested in the relationship between Rhodes’s business activities and his political career. His position in the Cape Colony legislature and later as prime minister gave him opportunities to influence policies that contributed to the development of racial discrimination. The book demonstrates how economic interests and political decisions could reinforce one another, producing consequences that extended far beyond Rhodes’s own lifetime.
What struck me most about the book is the way it connects Rhodes’s personal ambitions with the larger structures of colonial society. Rhodes accumulated enormous wealth through diamond and gold mining, but Storey makes clear that this wealth cannot be separated from the systems of labor, racial discrimination, and political power that supported his enterprises.
I was particularly interested in the relationship between Rhodes’s business activities and his political career. His position in the Cape Colony legislature and later as prime minister gave him opportunities to influence policies that contributed to the development of racial discrimination. The book demonstrates how economic interests and political decisions could reinforce one another, producing consequences that extended far beyond Rhodes’s own lifetime.
August 31, 2026
An impressively researched and extremely thorough biography. Adds significantly to the body of work on the man. My only dissapointment is that his final years are rather too briefly dealt with in my view.
December 21, 2025
Great book that shows how material conditions limited Rhodes, and also how the material conditions created by Rhodes still impact South Africa today
January 8, 2026
4.75⭐️
Highly insightful on an important issue
Highly insightful on an important issue
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews