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King Leopold's ghost : a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa
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King Leopold's ghost : a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa

by Adam Hochschild

This history examines King Leopold II's brutal colonisation of the Congo and the exploitation that led to millions of deaths. It documents the rise of an international human rights movement dedicated to exposing the atrocities committed under his regime.

Accession 13820 ISBN 9780395759240 Publisher Houghton Mifflin
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Crime Culture History Social Sciences
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2026-06-01 16:22
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LOCATION HISTORY
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Identity

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King Leopold's ghost : a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa
vernon_id
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13820
vernon_slug
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Descriptive

production_date
1998
object_type
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object_status
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brief_description
In the 1880s, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad.- Blurb

Subjects & people

authors→ author (initial fill only)
Adam Hochschild
tags→ tags
Social sciences, Civilisation, Sociology, Social history, Crime, Social problems, Slavery, Crimes against humanity, Africa -- History, Human rights, Genocide
subject_people
Joseph Conrad (b.1857, d.1924)
subject_objects
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