The Randlords: The Men Who Made South Africa by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
The Randlords: The Men Who Made South Africa by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Hardcover, ISBN 9780297784371
Publisher: Weidenfeld And Nicolson, 1985
Used - As new. This book is in a mint condition. The cover have some very limited signs of wear and the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. The book is protected with a Cellophane cover. Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied.
The Randlords by Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the story of those men who transformed South Africa from a dry barren land, leaving modern South Africa as their legacy, particularly Johannesburg whose history of mining underlies that of the whole country. Illustrated with b&w photos.
In the late 1860s South Africa was the forgotten end of the earth, remote, empty, and poor. Within thirty years it was irrevocably changed by the discovery of fabulous riches in diamonds and in gold. To these fields went every buccaneer, swindler, and adventurer at the turn of the century, where man of them made staggeringly huge fortunes, amassing baronetcies and Park Lane mansions along the way.
The Randlords, as they were called, were men of ferocious feuds and ambitions--men like Cecil Rhodes, who began life as a vicar's son and ended it with sinister ideals of Teutonic world domination; like Alfred Beit, gauche and celibate, as cripplingly shy as he was infinitely cunning and Barney Barnato, prizefighter, comic actor, unconvicted illicit diamond dealer, so expert in stock manipulation that by the time of his suicide at the age of forty-four he had come to swindling himself.
