Rhodes envisioned a secret Nordic-race society governing all peoples bureaucratically

Evidence

Nobody will ever pretend that Cecil Rhodes suffered from a lack of vanity. According to Jameson, he expected to be remembered for at least four thousand years. Yet, despite all his appetite for self-glorification, he hit upon the same idea of rule through secrecy as the overmodest Lord Cromer. Extremely fond of drawing up wills, Rhodes insisted in all of them (over the course of two decades of his public life) that his money should be used to found “a secret society …to carry out his scheme,” which was to be “organized like Loyola’s, supported by the accumulated wealth of those whose aspiration is a desire to do something,” so that eventually there would be “between two and three thousand men in the prime of life scattered all over the world, each one of whom would have had impressed upon his mind in the most susceptible period of his life the dream of the Founder, each one of whom, moreover, would have been especially—mathematically—selected towards the Founder’s purpose.” More farsighted than Cromer, Rhodes opened the society at once to all members of the “Nordic race” so that the aim was not so much the growth and glory of Great Britain—her occupation of the “entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific, …the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboards of China and Japan [and] the ultimate recovery of the United States”81—as the expansion of the “Nordic race” which, organized in a secret society, would establish a bureaucratic government over all peoples of the earth. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 553

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Islamophobia field work: Rhodes’ ‘Nordic race’ secret-society blueprint is an early documentary seed of race-thinking tied to bureaucratic empire, anticipating later readings on racialized governance.
• SEED: Angle: how a fantasy of race-based global bureaucracy by a private individual prefigures the state organs that later realize such governance — the private imagination becoming political infrastructure.