Caricature of Cecil John Rhodes in 1892 by Edward Linley Sambourne is in the public domain
Wealthy imperialist and entrepreneur, Cecil Rhodes, purchased the small farm De Beers Diamond Mine from two brothers in the 1860s. Several decades before this period, there was a massive boom in the diamond industry. Widespread discoveries of diamond mines led to pervasive exporting of diamonds. Surprisingly, this industry was not successful at its outset. Because so many diamonds were being sold, demand dropped causing the price of diamonds to decrease as well (Goldschein, 2011).
Cecil Rhodes capitalized on this market as a young entrepreneur. Using the money earned from mining on his small mine, he was financially able to purchase more and more mines until 1888 when he ultimately incorporated De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. In this year, De Beers also achieved the exclusive rights to mining in Lobengula. Due to this triumph, the British government offered Rhodes a royal charter to launch the British South African Company, which allowed him even more control over the resources and people of south-central and Southern Africa (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, n.d.) This company dominated nearly all the diamond mining and distribution for southern Africa and a sizeable portion of the world. Large distribution centers were placed in London and Israel. One of Rhodes’s keys to success was withholding the supply of diamonds to surge demand, therefore, causing prices to be excessively high (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, 2016).
De Beers owned an astonishing 90% of the world’s diamond market when Cecil Rhodes died in 1902 (Goldschein, 2011). Unfortunately for the BSAC, other rich diamond mines were discovered in 1902 and 1908 in Pretoria, which was an area in southwest Africa that was colonized by Germany. These discoveries diminished De Beers’s world market share of diamonds significantly. Nevertheless, after Rhodes’s death, Ernest Oppenheimer took over the company and exceeded Rhodes’s dreams of capturing the market, turning De Beers into a true, worldwide monopoly (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, 2016). To learn about horrific conflicts that developed as a result of the diamond industry, see the conflict portion of this site.
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Header Photo: Williams, G. F. (1905). Premier Mine Shaft(The Diamond Mines of South Africa). [Photograph]. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hole. Available under the Public Domain. Photo: Sambourne, E. L. (1892). The Rhodes Colossus. [Caricature]. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Punch_Rhodes_Colossus.png. Available under the Public Domain.