William Kelleher Storey

He 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 show more 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/review/colonialist-william-kelleher-storey-...

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). show less

Very useful little book to read before writing a major paper. Definitely reminded me of a lot of things to keep in mind or on the back burner and to go over again while doing research or proofreading the final copy.

Handy