Category: Educational Elites

• The "New World Order" of the 1890s

  This theory holds that Cecil Rhodes’s educational philanthropy, imperial politics, and private writings formed part of a long-range plan to weld the English-speaking world back into one political system under British direction. In its strongest form, the theory claims that the Rhodes Scholarships were not merely elite educational gifts, but talent-selection instruments for a secret society designed to recover Britain’s lost connection to the United States and create a new Anglo-imperial order. The documented record clearly shows that Rhodes’s 1877 “Confession of Faith” explicitly proposed a secret society for the extension of British rule and imagined an eventual Anglo-American reunion of world-historic significance. It also shows that his will later created scholarships for the colonies, the United States, and Germany. What remains more interpretive is how directly the scholarship program functioned as the operational successor to the original secret-society dream.