The Rhodes-Milner Group

This is an extract from a chapter called ‘Continuities of Empire’ from Pieterse’s forthcoming book Empire and Emancipation to be published by Praeger, New York. If the rest of the book is as good as this is, we are in for a treat.

“So marked was the Anglo-American rapprochement that many informed people suspected a secret alliance had been concluded … the Kaiser in later years believed that the Fatherland had been encircled since 1897 by a secret Anglo-American understanding.” Charles S. Campbell Jnr. (1957)

Information has subsequently come to light suggesting, even confirming and detailing precisely this, in a study by Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope (1966) (1) Since the information presented by Quigley is not included in the general literature on imperialism nor in diplomatic histories concerning this period, I will quote from this work repeatedly. Quigley introduced his account as follows:

There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act….I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early sixties, to examine its papers and secret records …. the American branch of this organisation (sometimes called the ‘Eastern Establishment’) has played a very significant role in the history of the United States in the last generation.(2)

Quigley is referring to the Round Table Groups set up in the early 1900s, which formed part of a more informal grouping whose period of activity has been described as ranging from 1884 to about 1915. The leading figure in this group was Cecil Rhodes.

Rhodes and associates had been inspired by John Ruskin who held the chair of Fine Arts at Oxford since 1870; it was from Ruskin that Rhodes derived his particular brand of “ethical racism” in which ideas of English aristocracy, civilisation and progress intermingled, against a backdrop of lurking danger threatening all of this. Rhodes, who has been described as a “mystical imperialist”(3) held deep convictions on this question: “In 1877, at 34, he made his first will, leaving his money for the formation of a secret society to extend British rule across the earth.”(4) Another influential figure was William T. Stead, “England’s most sensational journalist”, “an ardent social reformer and imperialist”. Together they brought about an association of like-minded Oxford and Cambridge groups:

This association was formally established an February 5, 1881, when Rhodes and Stead organised a secret society of which Rhodes had been dreaming for sixteen years. In this secret society Rhodes was to be leader; Stead, Brett (Lord Esher), and Milner were to form an executive committee; Arthur (Lord) Balfour, (Sir) Harry Johnston, Lord Rothschild, Albert (Lord) Grey, and others were listed as potential members of a “Circle of Initiates”; while there was to be an outer circle known as the “Association of Helpers” (later organised by Milner as the Round Table organisation).(5)

Alfred Milner, governor-general and high commissioner in South Africa in the period 1887-1905, headed the Rhodes Trust after Rhodes’ death in 1902. He once formulated his philosophy as follows: “It is a question of preserving the unity of a great race, of enabling it, by maintaining that unity, to develop freely on its own lines, and to continue its distinctive mission in the world.” (6) As governor-general of South Africa Milner recruited a group of young men, notably from Oxford, to assist him in organising his administration. This group, known as Milner’s Kindergarten, was responsible for devising the Union of South Africa. Quigley continues from here:

As soon as South Africa was united in 1910, the Kindergarten returned to London to try to federate the whole empire by the same methods. In 1909-13 they organised semi-secret groups, known as Round Table groups, in the chief British dependencies and the United States. These still function in eight countries … In 1919 they founded the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) for which the chief financial supporters were Sir Abe Bailey and the Astor family (owners of the Times). Similar Institutes of International Affairs were established in the chief British dominions and in the United States (where it is known as the Council on Foreign Relations) in the period 1919-27. After 1925 a somewhat similar structure of organisations, known as Institute of Pacific Relations, was set up in twelve countries holding territory in the Pacific area…

From 1884 to about 1915 the members of this group worked valiantly to extend the British Empire and to organise it in a federal system. They …. hoped to federate the various parts of the empire as seemed feasible, then confederate the whole of it, with the United Kingdom, into a single organisation. They also hoped to bring the United States into this organisation to whatever degree was possible.(7)

The official design for the modernisation of the British Empire had been formulated by Chamberlain as an Imperial Federation: a single economic unit with imperial tariffs (modelled on the German Zollverein), a common defence organisation and foreign policy, and an Imperial Parliament. In Hobson’s classical study of imperialism of 1902, the “root idea of empire” is defined as “a federation of states, under a hegemony.”(8)

The backbone of what Quigley calls the “English-speaking axis” of “the English and American Establishments” was the relationship between the financial circles of London and those of the eastern United States: the financial and economic nexus between the City of London and Wall Street. In Hobson’s study “the great financial houses” were identified as “the central ganglion of international capitalism” and “the prime determinants of imperial policy”, for they had the largest stake in it and the amplest means of shaping policy.(9) Hobson’s assumption is confirmed by Quigley:

The chief backbone of this organisation grew up along the already existing financial cooperation running from the Morgan Bank in New York to a group of international financiers in London led by the Lazard Brothers. Since 1925 there have been substantial contributions from wealthy individuals and from foundations and firms associated with the international banking fraternity, especially the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and other organisations associated with J.P.Morgan, the Rockefeller and Whitney families, and the associates of Lazard Brothers and of Morgan, Grenfell and Company.(10)

The City of London at the time was at the peak of its influence, financing the bulk of the world’s trade, while in the U.S. the pinnacles of economic and financial, and, to a large extent, also political power, were Morgan and Company in New York and the Rockefeller family of Ohio.(11)

Contemporary observers such as Hobson also noted, or at times only suspected, that the great financial houses controlled the press.(12) Quigley is more specific about the influence of the Rhodes-Milner group:

This group dominated The Times from 1890 to 1912 and has controlled it completely since 1912 (except for the years 1919-1922) …. Numerous other papers and journals have been under the control or influence of this group since 1889. They have also established and influenced numerous university and other chairs of imperial affairs and international relations. (13)

Hobson remarked on the role of the financial houses in “high politics”, and argued that “finance manipulates the patriotic forces which politicians, soldiers, philanthropists, and traders generate.”(14). Indeed, an both sides of the Atlantic there was a revolving door between Big Banking and high politics. For instance, Lord Milner, after refusing a partnership in the Morgan Bank in London,

became director of a number of public banks, chiefly the London Joint Stock Bank, corporate precursors of the Midland Bank. He became one of the greatest political and financial powers in England, with his disciples strategically placed throughout England in significant places.(15)

In 1915 Milner became one of the four members of the War Cabinet and in this capacity created the Imperial War Cabinet by adding Dominion Prime Ministers, notably General Smuts. After the war, as Colonial Secretary, Lord Milner negotiated independence for Egypt, self-government for Malta, and was involved in the arrangements for self-government for India (1919) and the partition of Ireland (1921)

These then were the politicians of Anglo-Saxonism, directly connected to the core financial, economic and political power structures in Britain and the United States. The “spectacular efflorescence of Anglo-Saxon legend” in 1898, mentioned above, occurred first in Britain, then in the United States as a chorus of political leaders and newspapers eulogised the “Anglo-Saxon alliance”. There was the Birmingham speech of Chamberlain (“I hope that blood will be found to be thicker than water”), the Earl of Rosebery’s lecture on the English-speaking Brotherhood, and these voices were echoed across the Atlantic by Senator Beveridge (“God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing … No! he has made us master organisers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns”), Andrew Carnegie (“I am a race patriot”) and so forth.(16)

An Anglo-American League was set up in London and an Anglo-American Committee in New York. In England, “so many Britons sought to enlist in the American forces that the embassy in London had to publicise a statement discouraging applications.”(17)

This outburst of Anglo-Saxonism may be considered as the culmination of an effort of many years on the part of W.T. Stead, inspired by Rhodes. “Fraternal union with the American Republic” had been the central purpose for which Stead’s Review of Reviews had been established according to the manifesto of its first issue of January 1891: “To all English-speaking folk.”(18) Independent sources, unaware of the existence of the Rhodes-Milner group, report the same names, the same configuration of influence as the trend-setting speechmakers and founders of organisations as those identified by Quigley as belonging to the Rhodes-Milner network of influence.(19)

The political record of this group, the politicians of Anglo-Saxonism, should be discussed in conjunction with the demise of the empire and the rise to hegemony of the United States – as one of the strands in the continuity of empire. But before doing so it may be worthwhile to pause and review a few specific situations in which members of the Rhodes-Milner group have been directly involved. It is a common observation that as part of the process of dismantling the British empire and decolonisation, time bombs have been planted and situations created with such in-built contradictions that sooner or later grave conflicts were bound to ensue. If the Rhodes-Milner and Round Table groups should be credited with being the chief architects of the modernisation of the British Empire, their record with respect to South Africa, Palestine and Ireland should be taken into account as well.

South Africa was one of the places where the political formula of the Anglo-Saxonists – federation and dominion status, as the new beacons of the latter days of British hegemony – was first applied, producing the Union of South Africa. Noteworthy in view of his later role is one of the members of Rhodes’ circle, “a brilliant young graduate of Cambridge, Jan Smuts, who had been a vigorous supporter of Rhodes and acted as his agent in Kimberley as late as 1895 and who was one of the most important members of the Rhodes-Milner group in the period 1908-1950 …. became the chief political adviser to President Kruger”, and after 1910 emerged as the dominant political figure in the Union of South Africa.(20)

The political basis of the Union of South Africa was the Anglo-Boer class alliance, founded on harsher terms for the African population than those of the Boer Republics, as evidenced by the constitution and legislation such as the Land Act. “By the Land Act of 1913 about 7% of the land area was reserved for future land purchases by natives and the other 93% for purchase by whites. At that time the native population exceeded the whites by at least fourfold.” (21) Thus the Anglo-Boer consensus was framed at the expense of the native population. It was then that the basic structure of apartheid was put into place: “the British conquest and creation of the Union, whose constitution decreed political servitude for the African, set up the conditions and structures that made it possible for Afrikaner racial nationalism to play its present role in South Africa.”(22)

Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, considered himself a “Jewish Cecil Rhodes” (23) and acted accordingly. “Herzl’s stencil for obtaining a territory and then clearing it for settlement was”, as Desmond Stewart pointed out, “cut after the Rhodesian model”.(24) As Rhodes had been backed financially by Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit in setting up Consolidated Gold Fields, and later the South African Company, Herzl sought the backing of de Hirsch and Rothschild for his plans. As Rhodes had found an imperial sponsor to charter and legalise his company (in 1889 it became the British South Africa Company under a Royal Charter), Herzl likewise sought imperial sponsorship. The envisioned Jewish Company or National Fund was to be the equivalent of the British South Africa Company. If Rhodes had first befriended a local potentate, King Lobengula of Matabeleland, and then crushed him and machine-gunned his people when they resisted the whites taking over their land, Herzl, once his choice had settled on Palestine as a future place of settlement for Jewish people, strove to use the Sultan.

As early as 1896 Herzl had thought of enlisting South Africans, such as “the South African goldmine billionaire Barnato”, to buy up the debt bonds of the Ottoman Sultan – if he would surrender Palestine. Herzl, however, was not as well-connected nor as successful as Rhodes. In the later years of his disappointment he sought to contact Rhodes through W.T. Stead, who reported “that he wanted to discuss with the one founder of States that modern times had produced.” In January 1902 he wrote to Rhodes that he was approaching him because “it is something colonial” (25) but the meeting never came about as Rhodes died in March that year.

While the founders of political Zionism approached the Kaiser, the Tsar, the Porte, it was from the British government that they obtained the first official recognition of their aspirations. In 1917 Chaim Weizman, one of the leaders of the World Zionist Organisation, sent a note to the Imperial War Cabinet stating that “we entrusted our national and Zionist destiny to the Foreign Office and the Imperial War Cabinet, in the hope that the problem would be considered in the light of Imperial interests.. .”(26)

The case for a national home for the Jews in Palestine was accepted by the Cabinet after they had been persuaded that a Jewish presence in Palestine would help to protect British interests in the Suez Canal, an argument pressed by Herbert Samuel. (27) The Balfour Declaration – less than eleven lines in a letter of 2 November 1917 from Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Baron de Rothschild – was the first demarche in the process that eventually led to the creation of the state of Israel. The timing of the declaration, five days before the Bolshevik take-over in St. Petersburg, was related, it has been argued, to a British attempt to deploy the Zionist network in Russia against the influence of the Bolsheviks, and was aimed to support the Kerensky government.(28)

It is relevant to note that the key parties involved in the Balfour Declaration were part of the Rhodes-Milner Group: Balfour, Milner, Smuts, and on the receiving end, Rothschild as one of the leading figures in the Zionist movement in England. General Smuts, an influential member of the Imperial War Cabinet, and Chaim Weizman (later the first president of Israel) became close friends. This historical background is also of importance in view of the close relationship which developed later between South Africa and Israel. (29)

The Rhodes-Milner group was also involved in the settlement of the Irish question. It was in The Round Table, the journal of the Round Table group, that the design of the settlement was first formulated: Lionel Curtis “advocated in the March 1920 issue that Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland be separated and each given Home Rule as autonomous parts of Great Britain. This was enacted into law eight months later as the Government of Ireland Act of 1920.”(30) The settlement was rejected by the Irish Republicans and the guerilla war continued. Curtis was appointed adviser on Irish affairs to the Colonial Office, then headed by Milner. Then General Smuts was called in as a mediator. “He wrote a conciliatory speech for King George to deliver at the opening of the Ulster Parliament, and made a secret visit to the rebel hiding place in Ireland to try to persuade the Irish Republican leaders to be reasonable. He contrasted the insecurity of the Transvaal Republic before 1895 with its happy condition under dominion status since 1910 …. Smuts arranged an armistice and a conference to negotiate a settlement.”(31) Out of this conference came the agreement of December 1921 which confirmed the status of Northern Ireland under the act of 1920 and gave the 26 counties dominion status as the Irish Free State. As Liam de Paor and others commented, the left republican movement and institutions were destroyed, and in a matter of years counter-revolution was triumphant in Ireland north and south.(32)

Had the same formula of federation been followed as in Australia and South Africa, a Union of Ireland would have been the more plausible format than the partition of Ireland. Through partition, a colonial settler state of Loyalists, descendants of the Cromwellian conquest, was created in Northern Ireland. It is in this sense that all three instances are similar: South Africa, Northern Ireland, and the Balfour Declaration which, in effect, called for another colonial settler state.

The accomplishment of the Balfour Declaration was defined by Arthur Koestler thus: one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third nation.(33) In each of these instances the “third nation” was not taken into account in the imperial settlement. Africans, the Irish nationalists in the six counties, and Palestinians were the betrayed parties, and, more than half a century later, they still have to fight for the right to be recognised – to be, of course, branded “terrorists” in the process.

What was taken into account were the geostrategic needs of the reformed empire – control of the Cape route and the South Atlantic, the security of the Suez canal, and naval bases in Northern Ireland. Thus they served as the usual “outposts of Western Civilisation” – and figure among today’s major issues. South Africa, the question of Palestine, and the Irish question, sharing the same formative period, owing their creation to the same decision-making network, serving the same geopolitical ambitions, stick out among the remaining shadows of empire.

According to Quigley the Round Table group was a front organisation for an inner circle which he usually refers to as the Rhodes-Milner group. Apparently this does not refer to actual persons – for Rhodes died in 1902 and Milner in 1925 – yet Smuts, for example, is mentioned as a member of the group from 1908 until 1950 (i.e. until his death). The concentric structure of the secret society reportedly set up by Rhodes in 1891, with its inner circle, outer organisation and associated helpers, resembles that of many organisations such as the Freemasons and the various esoteric organisations which were in vogue at the time. Rhodes, Rothschild and other members of the group were Freemasons as well, as were many of their counterparts across the Atlantic.(34) But Rhodes’ model in forming his organisation, according to statements made repeatedly over the years, were the Jesuits rather than the Masons: “He aimed at the foundation of a Society composed of men with strong convictions and of great wealth, which would do for the unity of the English-speaking race what the Society of Jesus did for the Catholic Church immediately after the Reformation.”(35)

The Counter-Reformation is a defensive model, appropriate to an empire in decline. Desmond Stewart characterises Rhodes as “the prophet of a complacent victorious people”.(36) But this is an erroneous assessment. Rhodes’ outlook was marked by anxiety, a sense of power circumscribed by an awareness of danger, as was Ruskin’s – the self-appointed guardian of the old and decaying order.(37) Oswald Spengler, for reasons of his own, also branded Rhodes as the harbinger of a new age who pointed the way out of the decline of Western civilisation: “Cecil Rhodes is the first man of a new age. He stands for the political style of a far-ranging, Western, Teutonic and essentially German future……”(38) To Spengler Rhodes appeared as one of the Caesar-men, announcing the arrival of the Imperial Age:

Before them the money collapses. The Imperial Age, in every culture alike, signifies the end of the politics of mind and money. The powers of the blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship. “Race” springs forth, pure and irresistible – the strongest win and the residue is their spoil … Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no more political problems.(39)

Rather than being the harbinger of a new age, Rhodes stood at the cusp of ages, at a point in time when Britain’s power was still vast but already waning. Britain is commonly described as being in a state of decline, uninterrupted decline, from 1870 onwards. (40) Threatening the old order from within were democratisation and the worker movement, and threatening the empire from without, rival powers as well as budding nationalisms in the colonies. Rhodes’ expansionist fever – “expansion is everything”, “I would annex the planets if I could” – seems an attempt to overreach a deeper anxiety of power slipping away, the expression of a very fin de siecle state of mind. Like Rhodes, Oswald Spengler, at another cusp in space and time, was clinging to two of the intoxicants of the epoch – empire and race. When the Imperial Age, of which Spengler sought to be prophet, came for Germany it took the shape of the Third Reich. It is telling, revealing a certain consistency in crisis of Western civilisation, that Adolph Hitler, like Rhodes before him, was fascinated with the example of the Society of Jesus which served as a model for the S.S..(41)

The need for an infrastructure of confidence beyond quid pro quo relations is not unusual, particularly in precarious times. Our social world is, by definition, an organised world, a world also where the course of affairs for certain parties involve high stakes and uncertain outcomes – hence attempts on the part of power elites to increase their grip on the course of affairs by means of setting up organisational infrastructures are plausible. (42) The Rhodes-Milner group is described by Quigley as still functioning, as an “Anglophile network”, at the time of his writing (1966). From Milner the leadership of the Round Table group passed to Lionel Curtis, who was succeeded by Robert (Lord) Brand, and, after his death in 1963, by Adam D. Marris. (The latter two were both former managing directors of Lazard Brothers).(43) But it would appear that as time went by this infrastructure became less central, as official and overt organisations took over much of the management of the course of affairs once a structure of cooperation, in particular between Britain and the United States, had been established.(44)

A prima facie impression might be that by and large, due to the outbreak of the Great War and other circumstances, the aspirations of the Rhodes-Milner group have not been realised. The five colonies of Australia were joined into the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, the Union of South Africa came about in 1910 – but instead of the once envisioned Imperial Federation what was achieved was the feeble structure of the Commonwealth of Nations. This, in fact, was the title of a book written in 1916 by Lionel Curtis. It was a turn-about which gave the Round Table group at the time a reputation of being moderates, liberals, even enlightened idealists, by comparison with the die-hards of empire and jingoism. The turn of the century ideas of Imperial Federation and Anglo-American Reunion were left behind for a reformation of the British Empire into a federation of self-governing and dominion states under the sovereignty of the Queen of England. Still, the underlying project of Anglo-Saxonism, of Anglo-Saxon c.q. Anglo-American hegemony, was not abandoned, and this notion of an enduring infrastructure of Anglo-American ruling class influence was more important than the specific forms this might take in terms of international law.

From the turn of the century, the British Empire, supreme and solitaire through most of the 19th century, began to surround itself with alliances. The Anglo-American alliance which became a public fact after 1898 was followed by the alliance with Japan in 1902, concluded at a time when for a European power to ally itself with an oriental power was an unprecedented step. This followed on Russia’s occupation of Manchuria. In 1904 Tokyo obtained loans in preparation for war via a Hong Kong banking group from London and New York. “In 1904-5 Anglo-American haute finance as much Anglo-American haute politique was thus co-operatively attached to the Japanese side.”(45)

During the Russo-Japanese war Japan was given passive protection by the Royal Navy, while Roosevelt discretely notified Germany and France that in the event of their combining against Japan, the U.S. would intervene on its behalf: all of which indicates the extent of Anglo-American co-operation. Like Britain and the U.S., Japan was a naval power. “Through the alliance with Japan and the destruction of May 1905 of the Russian navy the need had disappeared for the China Battle Fleet …. Most British ships were therefore recalled from the Far East …. To her Japanese ally, whose naval growth had been rapid, Great Britain thus assigned the major share of policing the coast of China.”(46)

The Anglo-French entente cordiale of 1907 stabilised the situation in Persia and the Near East where Germany with the Baghdad railway, was pressing toward the Persian Gulf, and in Asia, where a revolutionary movement in India was active contrary to the interests of both Britain and Russia.(47) Thus, in a short space of time, Britain, which had been isolated in the early 1890s, managed to conclude alliances which turned the tables on Germany, making its cauchemar des coalitions into a reality. Among these alliances the Anglo-American rapport was the most fundamental and enduring, the core structure of a transnational ruling class alliance into whose orbit other allies were recruited. If in its early days the British Empire had been put together with the assistance of “martial races” enlisted to fight for the imperial cause, in its latter days it was defended with the assistance of martial powers, enlisted to check the advance of other rising powers, and through settlements with colonial settler states and other regional allies: that is, through a politics of redivide and rule on a global scale.

The significance of this period of decline of the British Empire is that at the same time the framework was established for 20th century geopolitics. In particular, the groundwork was laid for United States hegemony, although this did not fully unfold until after two world wars. Anglo-American co-operation was one of the factors that went into building the position of the United States as a global power.

The Anglo-American links forged by the Rhodes Trust and the Round Table group derived their significance from their comprehensive nature, including political links, the nurturing of “racial affinities” and financial-economic links between London and New York, connecting the financial hegemony of the City of London as the hub of a receding empire to the rising fortunes of Wall Street. The subsequent shift of the centre of gravity of Anglo-Saxon hegemony from one side of the Atlantic to the other was thus already built into the design of the Anglo-Saxon alliance. The reality of the “Anglo-Saxon legend’ was that in this way a doomed and decrepit empire was inconspicuously transformed into a trans-Atlantic combine of finance capitalism.

NOTES

  1. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: a history of the world in our time, (Macmillan, New York, 1966)
  2. ibid p950
  3. Richard Shannon, The crisis of imperialism, 1865-1915, (Paladin, London 1974) p322-3
  4. James Morris, Pax Britannica, the climax of an empire, (Faber and Faber, London 1968) p417. The will is reproduced in W.T. Stead “The last will and testament of Cecil John Rhodes”, in The Review of Reviews (London) 1902 pp58-60
  5. Quigley op.cit. p131
  6. Quoted in J.R. Jones “England” in Hans Rogger and Eugene Weber (eds) The European Right, (University of California Press, 1966) p36
  7. Quigley op.cit. pp 132,133,144
  8. J.A. Hobson, Imperialism, a study, (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1902/1965) p8
  9. Hobson ibid pp56, 59
  10. Quigley, op.cit. p951
  11. cf Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s sixty families, (Vanguard, New York, 1937) p34
  12. Hobson, op.cit. pp59-61
  13. Quigley op.cit. p133. Mention is also made of relationships between the Round Table journal and the New York Times, The Herald Tribune, Christian Monitor, The Washington Post and Boston Evening Transcript; ibid p953
  14. Hobson, op.cit. p59
  15. Quigley op.cit. p951 Cf. John Evelyn Wrench Alfred Lord Milner, the man of no illusions, (Eyre and Spottiswoode, London 1958).
  16. Quoted in Lionel Gelber, The rise of Anglo-American friendship: a study in world politics 1898-1906, (Archon, Connecticut, 1938/1966) p25; Charles S. Campbell Jr. Anglo-American understanding 1898-1903, (Baltimore, 1957) p42; H.C.Allen Great Britain and the United States; a history of Anglo-American relations 1783-1952 (Odhams, London 1954), pp98-108
  17. Campbell ibid p43
  18. Stead op.cit. pp99-102
  19. See, for example, the list of some 70 prominent figures who contributed statements advocating Anglo-American ‘reunion’ to the June 1898 issue of Stead’s Review of Reviews, an issue devoted to propaganda for “an informal Association of Friendly Fellowship” for promoting common action throughout the English-speaking world. On the list are many figures who were members of the Rhodes-Milner circle, including Rhodes himself. Several of these names recur as founders and members of the Anglo-American League established in London on July 13 1898; cf Campbell, op.cit. pp 44,46.
  20. Quigley op.cit. pp137,139
  21. Quigley op.cit. p139
  22. Bernard Makosezwe Magubane The political economy of race and class in South Africa, (Monthy Review Press, New York, 1979) p53
  23. Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the age of dictators, (Croom Helm, London, 1983) p8
  24. Desmond Stewart, Theodor Herzl, artist and politician, (Quartet, London,) 1974/81. This paragraph encapsulates Stewart on pp180, 90, 285, 290-292
  25. Roger Garaudy, The case of Israel, (Shorouk International, London, 1983) p56
  26. ibid p58
  27. John Marlow, Milner, apostle of Empire, (Hamish Hamilton, London 1976) p331. According to a memo sent by Samuel to Milner in December 1916. Samuel also mentioned the possible danger of a French occupation of southern Syria. By summer 1917 Milner was a “convinced supporter of Zionism”. The Round Table group discussed Zionism in March 1917. The June 1917 issue of The Round Table discussed Palestine as a British protectorate with a prospect of being able to grow into a British dominion. When the Balfour Declaration, which had been drafted by Leo Amery at the request of Milner, was presented to the War Cabinet on 4 October 1917, the three arguments used by Balfour to persuade the Cabinet were that the Declaration would (1) recruit support for the Allies among Russian Jews who were thought to be influential in Russian revolutionary circles, (2) forestall an expected German pro-Zionist commitment, and (3) attract to the Allied cause the powerful support of American-Jewish finance. ibid pp332-3.
  28. See above note 27; Brenner op.cit. pp9-12; Maxime Rodinson, Israel: a colonial settler state?, (Monad, New York, 1973) p47. The implication of this is that from its conception a “Jewish national home” in Palestine (cq Israel) figured as part of an anti-communist coalition.
  29. The most extensive discussion is James Adams, The unnatural alliance: Israel and South Africa, (Quartet, London, 1984). One may add Rhodesia in this context.
  30. Quigley op.cit. p174. The theme was not without irony for Rhodes himself had been a supporter of Irish Home Rule and had relied on the support of the Irish party in Parliament. cf Stead, Last Will ibid, pp 129-30
  31. Quigley op.cit. p175
  32. Liam de Paor, Divided Ulster, (Penguin, London, 1970) pl07
  33. Quoted in Garaudy op.cit. p48
  34. William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt (as well as FDR, Trueman and others) are among American Presidents listed as Masons in H.L. Haywood, Famous Masons, (Richmond, USA, 1946).
  35. Stead, Last Will pp62-3, also 66, 83. Stead spoke of Rhodes as “the first of the Millionaire Monarchs of the Modern World … more than an empire maker.. more than the founder of a dynasty … he wished to found an Order as an instrument of the will of Dynasty, and while he lived he dreamed of being both its Caesar and its Loyola”; ibid p56. In a letter from Rhodes to Stead in March 1891, accompanying his fourth will, he wrote: “Please remember the key of my idea discussed with you is a Society, copied from the Jesuits as to organisation”…and as to “the object of England everywhere and united”…”the only thing feasible to carry this idea out is a secret one (society) gradually absorbing the wealth of the world to be devoted to such an object.” ibid pp64 and 73.
  36. Stewart, Herzl op.cit. p188
  37. cf Holbrook Jackson on Ruskin in The rise and fall of 19th century idealism, (Citadel, New York, 1969), p95f
  38. Oswald Spengler, The decline of the West, Vol.1,(Knopf, New York, 1918/1980) p37
  39. ibid. Vol 2 p432 Emphasis in the original.
  40. E.g. Bernard Porter, The lion’s share: a short history of British imperialism 1850-1983, (Longman, London 1984) 2nd edition p259
  41. Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, (London 1939)
  42. It may be appropriate in this context to cite what William Domhoff wrote in connection with his work on the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR): “Critics of a power elite theory often call it “conspiratorial”, which is the academic equivalent of ending a discussion by yelling Communist. It is difficult to lay this charge to rest once and for all because these critics really mean something much broader than the dictionary definition of conspiracy. All right, then, if “conspiracy” means that these men are aware of their interests, know each other personally, meet together privately and off the record, and try to hammer out a consensus on how to anticipate or react to events and issues, then there is some conspiring that goes on in CFR, not to mention in the Committee for Economic Development, the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency.” G. William Domhoff, “Who made American Foreign Policy 1945-1963?” in David Horowitz ed. Corporations and the Cold War, (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1969) p34n
  43. For current information on the Round Table group see Robin Ramsay “Changing the guard: notes on the Round Table network and its offspring” in Lobster No. 6, pp16-19.
  44. Carroll Quigley’s work is standard fare among American right-wing conspiracy theorists. E.g, Des Griffin Fourth Reich of the Rich, (Emissary, California, 1976); Howard S. Katz, The warmongers, (Books in Focus, New York 1979). Here, along with works such as E.C.Knuth’s The empire of the city (1946), it serves as part of a line of thinking that is anti-British, anti-Semitic and anti-communist. Yet Quigley’s work does not itself belong to this category.** Its findings, on the Rhodes-Milner group and the Round Table network are corroborated by all sources, whether in a general sense (as by Hobson’s work on imperialism) or in specifics. It is remarkable therefore that his work and the questions raised by it are almost entirely absent from mainstream scholarship. The Round Table group, or the Rhodes-Milner network do not figure in standard works such as T.D. Lloyd, The British Empire 1558-1983, (OUP, Oxford, 1984). “The history of the Round Table movement has yet to be written” wrote A.L. Burt in 1956. Walter Nimmocks, Milner’s young men: the ‘Kindergarten’ in Edwardian imperial affairs, (Hodder and Stoughton, London 1968/70) mentions no more than an unpublished PhD dissertation and three articles (one of them by Quigley on the subject). John Marlow’s 1976 study Milner, apostle of empire, devotes one chapter (10) to the Round Table, which generally confirms the observations of Quigley. He quotes Lloyd George who described the Round Table group as “a very powerful combination…behind the scenes they have much power and influence” (p215).
  45. Gelber Anglo-American Friendship p172
  46. ibid p130
  47. The Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907 divided Persia into a Russian northern sphere and a British (Southeast and Persian Gulf) sphere. William Woodruff, Impact of Western man: a study of Europe’s role in the world economy 1750-1960, (St. Martin’s New York, 1966) pp24-25. It was one of the developments that lead Lenin to say “Russia has been appointed gendarme over Asia by the European powers” (as quoted by W.F. Wertheim in a personal letter drawing my attention to this issue).

** Quigley himself, in parentheses, says of the right-wing interpretations made of his work that they are ‘garbage’ – as quoted in Robert Eringer, The global manipulators, (Pentacle, Bristol, 1980).

Accessibility Toolbar