By Rhodes?
We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for surplus goods produced in our factoriesThis is allegedly a quotation from Cecil Rhodes. But did he actually say this? While the sentiments seem entirely consistent with his imperialism (appalling even by the standards of the day), the language sounds wrong to me. I first found this quote in The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization (Wayne Ellwood, Verso, 2001), which cites an article in the Ecologist (Empires Without Armies, by Edward Goldsmith, the Ecologist, 29(2) May/June 1999, 154-157). That article doesn't give any source for the quote beyond 'explicitly stated in the 1890s by [...] Cecil Rhodes.
You can this quote all over the net, but I have not yet found a single pointer to a source. Honourable mentions go to Nicholas Hildyard and Wayne Ellwood for citing the place where they found it, but that's not quite the same.
The earliest dated version I can see is from a
1996 talk
by Nicholas Hildyard of The Corner House.
aha: from
the Edward Goldsmith site:
R. Dumont and N. Cohen, "The Growth of Hunger: A New Politics of Agriculture", Marion Boyars, London 1980. UL: 235.d.98.1. Dumont and Cohen, in a text stuffed with citation, also don't give a source for this quotation. Whilst in the UL I browsed half a dozen biographies of Rhodes, some fairly revisionist, and found no mention of this quotation. But I did get a hint that Rhodes was taken (admiringly) as an examplar of imperialism by one Hobson, around 1900, in work that was in turn used by Lenin. So may be that's a source to look.
