Anglo-American Establishment by Carroll Quigley

One wintry day in 1891, Cecil Rhodes, W.T. Stead, and Reginald Brett sketched out the blueprint for a secret society. Quigley calls it by its proper name: the Anglo-American Establishment. This tightly bound circle — structured as “The Society of the Elect” with an outer ring of “Helpers” — wielded power for decades, guiding Britain’s imperial policies, steering its wars, and even shaping the Atlantic alliance.

Quigley tracks the society through its many masks: Rhodes’s dream of empire, Milner’s Kindergarten of protégés, the Round Table Group, the “Chatham House crowd.” He shows how its reach extended into Oxford colleges, The Times newspaper, the Rhodes Trust, and later into the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Its fingerprints appear on the Jameson Raid, the Boer War, the formation of South Africa, and the League of Nations.

Unlike conspiracy “theories,” this work is anchored in names, dates, and institutions. Quigley lists the men who carried Milner’s vision forward, and he appends a tentative roster of members. He documents how funds from trusts and families, from Astor to Bailey, supplied the lifeblood of the group. Most strikingly, he reveals how these elites not only managed policy but controlled its history, dominating the very sources through which posterity would interpret their actions.

For readers who want history’s missing dimension — who sense that official accounts omit the machinery of influence — this book is indispensable. Quigley’s study is both revelation and record, an unmasking of the men and networks who, from Rhodes to Cliveden, helped script the twentieth century. (1981ed, 354pp, pb)