Few leaders in history have aspired to territorial aggrandisement on the scale of Cecil Rhodes. The Anglo-Saxons were the finest race in the world, he declared, and ‘the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.’ He envisaged forming a secret society, modelled on the Jesuits, to bring all ‘uncivilised’ regions of the globe under the Union Jack, recover America and usher in a reign of universal peace. He even spoke of annexing the planets. ‘All this is to be painted red; this is my dream,’ said Rhodes, rubbing his hand, over a map of southern Africa. It was a dream he pursued with revivalist fervour. For his late-Victorian compatriots, he embodied the spirit of British imperialism: a famous Punch cartoon, ‘The Rhodes Colossus’, showed him straddling the African continent, one foot on Table Mountain, the other in the delta of the Nile.

According to the American academic William Kelleher Storey, Rhodes was able to go a long way towards realising his vision because he was so well attuned to the material and social circumstances of his day. Unlike other biographies, therefore, this one concentrates on technological developments – railways, telegraphs, weaponry, shipping, mining gear and agricultural equipment. It also highlights Rhodes’s skill in manipulating the engineers, partners, bankers, investors, journalists and politicians who were essential to his commercial and colonising enterprises. Rhodes believed that amalgamation was more profitable than competition, to be achieved not so much by duress as by guile, cajolery and financial inducement (or straightforward bribery). The author Olive Schreiner, who once got so furious with him at a dinner party that she banged her head on the table, detected beneath the surface of his fascinating personality ‘the worms of falsehood and corruption’. But Rhodes reckoned that every man had a price. He proposed to ‘square’ the pope over Ireland and the Mahdi over Sudan. To assist in the conquest of the land that would eventually bear his name, it was suggested that he would ‘find means of squaring the tsetse fly’.

Rhodes’s career was meteoric. The fifth son of the vicar of Bishop’s Stortford, he was sent off in 1870 at the age of seventeen to grow cotton in Natal. Soon he was harvesting a much richer crop from the newly discovered diamond fields of Kimberley. But he did not value gems for their own sake. They were crystallised power: Rhodes would gaze into the big hole dug out of Colesberg Kopje and calculate just how much power it would yield. He maximised production using modern excavation methods and a black labour force that was harshly regimented and housed in prison-like compounds. He also skimped on safety measures, which resulted in many accidents, including a disastrous fire at his De Beers mine that killed over two hundred workers. Within two decades, Rhodes was king of diamonds, controlling 90 per cent of the world’s output and setting prices by regulating supplies. He could now afford to build a series of British colonies in Africa.

Characteristically, he did so by collaborating with putative Boer rivals. Having entered politics, he became prime minister of the Cape Colony in 1890 with support from the Afrikaner Bond, whose members shared Rhodes’s racial prejudices. ‘The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise,’ Rhodes proclaimed. ‘We must adopt a system of despotism, such as works so well in India, in our relations with the barbarians of South Africa.’ Exploiting a mining concession dubiously wrung from King Lobengula of Matabeleland, he formed a chartered company which sent an expedition into Matabele territory. This inevitably led to clashes and, in 1893, to war. Lobengula’s impis were mown down by Maxim guns; a subsequent uprising, prompted by white rapine, was quelled with still greater ferocity. Rhodes favoured killing as many Matabele as possible to teach the rest a lesson and he admired the scientific precision with which the slaughter could be accomplished. Describing how each wave of warriors ‘left a thick deposit of corpses on the ground’, he observed: ‘there is no waste with the Maxims.’

Two years later, Rhodes overreached himself. He had earlier secured the road to the north by establishing Bechuanaland as a British protectorate, but he now feared a challenge from the Boers, newly enriched thanks to gold strikes in the Transvaal. The British gold-diggers (known as uitlanders) who converged on the Witwatersrand in northern Transvaal were to be his Trojan horse. With the connivance of the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, Rhodes plotted to use them to overthrow the Transvaaler government of Paul Kruger. But the attempted coup, named the Jameson Raid after its leader, Rhodes’s much-loved crony Dr Leander Starr Jameson, was a fiasco. The uitlanders failed to rise and Jameson’s invading rabble was quickly forced to surrender. There was an elaborate official cover-up but Rhodes had to resign. He remained a Napoleonic figure, lending strong support to the bloody imposition of British rule in South Africa during the Boer War. Just before its end, he died of heart failure. His famous last words were ‘so little done, so much to do’ (though he might actually, addressing his servant, have said, ‘Turn me over, Jack’).

Storey’s account of Rhodes’s odyssey is scholarly but, alas, dull. This is partly because it is written, as he acknowledges, in the shadow of Robert Rotberg’s monumental study The Founder (1988). To shed fresh light on Rhodes, Storey focuses on the nuts and bolts of his mining operations and the minutiae of his business dealings. Yet these are the least interesting aspects of a life filled with action and adventure. In any case, Rhodes was more architect than mechanic. Storey hardly evokes what Kipling called ‘the immense and brooding Spirit’ of this ‘dreamer devout’. Rhodes was an enigmatic mixture of ruthless pragmatism and high idealism, Roman stoicism and romantic emotionalism. He was pirate and prophet, predator and philanthropist, champion of the sjambok and the scholarship. He was no orator and the ideas that motivated him comprised, in G K Chesterton’s phrase, ‘the dregs of Darwinian culture’. Jameson even said that Rhodes was ‘a nice old lady but not a genius’. Yet he was undeniably charismatic. To Mark Twain, Rhodes was ‘the only unroyal outsider whose arrival in London can compete for attention with an eclipse’.

Storey not only fails to convey the full complexity of Rhodes’s character. He also writes in prose that is always laboured and sometimes inept. He remarks, for example, that Lucy Cavendish, whose husband was stabbed to death in Dublin’s Phoenix Park by Fenians wielding long surgical knives, had ‘negative experiences with Irish nationalists’. Storey also betrays occasional unfamiliarity with the British scene. He completely misunderstands the aim of the Oxford Movement, which was not to challenge ‘the authority of the Church of England’ but to ground it in its Catholic past. Moreover, he states as fact matters that are unproven: that King Lobengula poisoned himself; that Viscount Drumlanrig was Lord Rosebery’s lover; that Rhodes blackmailed Chamberlain by threatening to implicate him in the Jameson Raid. Finally, the book contains only one map, a serious deficiency for a work that is almost as much about geography as history. Those seeking an insight into the controversy that continues to swirl around Rhodes should look elsewhere.