July 5, 1853 - Cecil Rhodes
Rhodes built one of the most consequential private empires of the nineteenth century, controlling not only the majority of the world's diamond supply but also the political and territorial machinery of a vast stretch of southern Africa. His British South Africa Company administered lands seized through treaties and force, displacing African populations and laying groundwork for systems of racial segregation that would outlast him by generations. The scale of his ambition — territorial, commercial, and ideological — made him a central architect of British imperial expansion at its most aggressive phase.
From Wikipedia
Cecil John Rhodes ( SES-əl ROHDZ; 5 July 1853 – 26 March 1902) was a British mining magnate and politician in southern Africa who served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. He and his British South Africa Company founded the southern African territory of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), which the company named after him in 1895. He also devoted much effort to realizing his vision of a Cape to Cairo Railway through British territory. Rhodes set up the Rhodes Scholarship, which is funded by his estate.
The son of a vicar, Rhodes was born in Netteswell House, Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire. At age sixteen, his family sent him to South Africa in the hopes the climate might improve his poor health. At eighteen, he entered the diamond trade at Kimberley in 1871 and with funding from Rothschild & Co, began to systematically buy out and consolidate diamond mines. Over the next two decades, he gained a near-complete monopoly of the world diamond market.
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