King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

By Adam Hochschild

Categories: History

Adam Hochschild tells how Leopold II of Belgium seized the Congo River basin in the 1880s as his private colony, using Henry Morton Stanley to obtain treaties from local chiefs while posing as a humanitarian. Congolese were forced to gather ivory and rubber through hostage-taking, flogging and mutilation, and the population fell by millions. Hochschild also profiles those who exposed the abuses, among them George Washington Williams, the shipping clerk E. D. Morel and Roger Casement, whose campaign became an international human rights movement.

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• Ryan Holiday: “King Leopold's Ghost is about how much evil one person can do–his colony in the Belgian Congo was a crime against humanity akin to the Holocaust. ... I had not heard of either of them until I read these books.”