G Seymour Fort

This is one of those old biographies full of praise and overawed by the subject, the German born but very anglophile Alfred Beit ( he became a British subject with a house on Park Lane and an English country estate ); it was published in 1932 though Beit died in 1906. Rhodes was his partner and pre deceased him by only four years . He too died in middle age . This book is an important source of information about Beit , Rhodes and other early Johannesburg mining magnates . Beit was a financial genius who made his fortune in diamonds in Kimberley and a second fortune in gold . He was one of the Rand Lords of the entrepreneurial early days of Witwatersrand , the 1880's to 1900's , when fortunes were made (and lost) in prospecting, land purchases, forming companies, trading in shares and consolidating the company system into what became known as the group system . Gold mining quickly came to be dominated by several large corporations and holding companies . Large capital investments were required and men such as Beit and Rhodes, Robinson , Barnato and Phillips raised the capital on the London Stock exchange and with the backing of the big British merchant bankers . Beit is here described as the financial genius who could read and understand balance sheets in an instant . Beit features , with a more critical insight in Geoffrey Wheatcroft's book . Beit was hugely influenced by Rhodes ideas about the British empire and painting the map of Africa red with an imperial mission. Through Rhodes he was drawn into the politics of the mid 1890's and the abortive coup , the Jameson Raid, when a small group of renegwdes with Rand capital backing planned to overthrow the Kruger government. But perhaps Beit's financial legacy and will were more important than his life as he left his fortune in educational and transport bequests . He was farsighted in his belief that Africa could and would only be developed through investment in a transport infrastructure , the railways, roads and bridges to open up the continent to trade , movement and mining . He was the Bill Gates of his day as his philanthropy was towards public goods though it was after his death that the Beit Trust backed major African engineering projects such as the wonderful Birchenough bridge and Beit bridge over the Limpopo . Beit left a significant sum to establish a university in Johannesburg but what happened to that bequest is another story . In summary this book is important as a work of reference with its detailed appendices about the Beit bequests. It is an old collector's book and belongs in an Africana collection .… (more)