The Last Empire

by Kanfer, Stefan

• ISBN13: 9780374524265
• ISBN10: 0374524262
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-05-01
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux

Summary

De Beers Consolidated Mines is fighting for its life. The most powerful and secretive cartel in the world faces diamond smuggling in Angola, disruption in Russia, and a world-wide recession. But this is not the first emergency De Beers has confronted in its long history of struggle and survival. In The Last Empire, Stefan Kanfer chronicles the nineteenth-century diamond rush that transformed Johannes De Beer's humble South African farmstead into an exotic Klondike. With a scholar's precision and a novelist's eye, he recounts the rise of wild frontier towns like New Rush (now Kimberley) and Johannesburg, and their roisterous mix of plutocrats and prostitutes, gamblers and politicians. Kanfer shows the roots of the racial crisis in the developing land: the misery of black miners and the fortunes of white prospectors; the defeat of the African emperor Lobengula and the rise of his legendary adversary, Cecil Rhodes, who would rule both the Cape Colony and De Beers. In the twentieth century, the cartel comes under the control of the Oppenheimers, a German-Jewish dynasty that builds De Beers and its gold-mining twin, the Anglo American Corporation, into an empire of unmatched global reach, and creates a shadow government more flexible and powerful than South Africa's official leadership. Kanfer documents the Oppenheimers' dealings on and under the table: their condemnation of apartheid even as they exploit cheap black labor, their quiet takeover of Salomon Brothers, their monopoly on diamonds and their grip on gold maintained at all costs and by any means. And he uncovers the passionate inside story of the billionaire family whose empire, he argues, will survive well into the twenty-firstcentury.

Author Biography

Stefan Kanfer, a longtime editor and critic for Time magazine, writes drama criticism and social history for The New Leader, Civilization, and many other journals. He lives in New York

Table of Contents

Introduction: Mere Carbon, After All	p. 3
Romancing the Stone	p. 13
A Focus of Human Passion	p. 15
Deeper into the Earth	p. 35
The Boy-Men	p. 53
"We Had Better Join Hands"	p. 67
A Vehicle for Plunder	p. 81
Vanity and Depravity	p. 97
Lying in State	p. 115
Exit Rhodes, Enter Hoggenheimer	p. 139
Spero Optima	p. 157
The Spectre, the Scam, and Satyagraha	p. 159
Monkeying About with the Capital	p. 176
A Side Entrance to De Beers	p. 192
The Death of Hope	p. 208
Cleaving a Diamond with a Butter Knife	p. 225
Getting Away with It	p. 242
Crowning the New King	p. 259
Connoisseur of Chaos	p. 279
A Nasty Sort of Survival	p. 281
Funigalo and Flash Fred	p. 296
Under Anglo Every One	p. 312
Boiler Room Follies	p. 329
But Never Jam Today	p. 343
The Most Dangerous Age	p. 357
Notes	p. 375
Index	p. 395
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