Cecil Rhodes Quotes
I would annex the planets if I could.
Cecil Rhodes, 1853-1902, Prime Minister of Cape Colony (South Africa), Last Will and Testament, 1902
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Hobson, like Mark Twain in America, was a major critic of imperialism.
When the British first colonized South Africa, the area they used was not inhabited or very sparcely so. However, some Black tribes (including the Zulus) were moving from the north and themselves were colonizing or annexing the sparcely populated areas to their kingdom. The British were most interested in Trading so did not have large land asperations. The Dutch white Boer Africanners, in contrast, wanted to farm the lands and use the range for their cattle. They wanted the land. The English policy was that there would be friendly relations with the Black tribes surrounding their Cape Colony and no one should take their land. However the Boers started attacking the Black areas and seizing their farms and villages. At first, the English assumed that the Blacks would easily be able to ward off the invasion as the Afrikanners had no professional troops like the British. However, the neighboring native tribes were not very warlike or good fighters. They were being overrun by the Zulus coming from the North and the Boers from the South. The British Government had a real problem in that they would have to have British soldiers fight the white Afrikanners if they wanted to stop the illegal white invasions. This was the root of the Boer War where the British would be fully at war with the Africanners.
Xerxes was as the Texans say, “All hat and no cattle.” He had delusions of grandeur and was quite unsuccessful as a conqueror.
1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor. He was the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, but gave the English response to the Morocco crisis.
America had declared war on Mexico and President Polk had designs on California and other territory.
Jefferson was not the only one who thought that taking Canada and driving the English out would be relatively easy as Canada was vast and the English troops were spread very thin. However, although the English had great strategic weakness, the American officers who led the Canadian effort were not very competent and made a series of terrible tactical decisions and the Canadian operation failed in a terrible fiasco.
This quotation is a good illustration of a practice that existed in the age of Empire where two or more large powers would agree among themselves as to which one of them had the right to seize a smaller power, not part of the compact.
Cromwell had died and Charles II had not yet regained power.
At the time, some Palestinian Arabs claimed exclusive rights to the territory on the grounds that Arabs had dominated the area for the longest period of time. They gave no credence to the fact that the Jews had dominated the area and it was the center of their kingdom for many years before—that Jews had constantly lived in the area of longer than the Arabs, nor did they give any credence to the fact that the Christians had conquered the area from the Muslims during the Crusades.
Cecil John Rhodes PC was a British mining magnate and politician in southern Africa who served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. An ardent believer in British imperialism, Rhodes 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. South Africa's Rhodes University is also named after him. He also put much effort towards his vision of a Cape to Cairo Railway through British territory. Rhodes set up the provisions of the Rhodes Scholarship, which is funded by his estate.
