Early mining capital sought pure profit while Rhodes fused business with politics

Evidence

Very characteristic in this respect was Barnato’s attitude when it came to the amalgamation of his business with the Rhodes group. “For Barnato the amalgamation was nothing but a financial transaction in which he wanted to make money…He therefore desired that the company should have nothing to do with politics. Rhodes however was not merely a business man…” This shows how very wrong Barnato was when he thought that “if I had received the education of Cecil Rhodes there would not have been a Cecil Rhodes” (ibid.). — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2341

Categorization

• XREF: Rhodes as the archetype of the imperialist business mind connects to Arendt’s portrait of the ‘imperialist character’ and the surplus-capital thesis in the main text.