The Rt Hon Cecil John Rhodes DCL (5 July 1853 – 26 March 1902) was a British businessman, mining magnate, and politician in South Africa. Rhodes was named the chairman of De Beers at the company's founding in 1888. De Beers, established with funding from NM Rothschild & Sons Limited in 1887, today markets 40% of the world's rough diamonds, and at one time marketed 90%. An ardent believer in British colonialism, Rhodes was the founder of the southern African territory of Rhodesia, which was named after him in 1895. South Africa's Rhodes University is also named after Rhodes. He set up the provisions of the Rhodes Scholarship, which is funded by his estate.Historian Richard A. McFarlane has called Rhodes "as integral a participant in southern African and British imperial history as George Washington or Abraham Lincoln are in their respective eras in United States history... Most histories of South Africa covering the last decades of the nineteenth century are contributions to the historiography of Cecil Rhodes."
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