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Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of Leopold's brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver. In the late nineteenth century, a time when Africa was being parcelled among European powers, King Leopold of Belgium seized vast, untapped territories around the Congo River. Under his brutal regime, resources were plundered, natives oppressed and populations halved. Amidst the corruption, Leopold maintained a façade of a compassionate leader. In King Leopold's Ghost, author Adam Hochschild introduces us to a group of missionaries and idealists who, upon their arrival in Africa, found themselves in the middle of a horrifying holocaust. Their courage to stand against Leopold shines a light on this often overlooked chapter of history. A devastating piece of African history, King Leopold's Ghost explores the grave cost paid by those silenced by colonial terror. 'All the tension and drama that one would expect in a good novel' - Robert Harris, author of Fatherland
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The Congo Free State was under the personal rule of King Leopold II of the Belgians from 1885 to 1908. The accolades that attended its founding were soon contested by accusations of brutality, oppression, and murderous misrule, but the controversy, by itself, proved insufficient to prompt changes. Starting in 1896, concerned men and women used public opinion to influence government policy in Britain and the United States to create space for reforming forces in Belgium itself to pry the Congo from Leopold’s grasp and implement reforms. Examining key factors in the successes and failures of a pivotal movement that aided the colonized people of the Congo and broadened the idea of human rights...
"The twenty years of my life which I here present to readers are the twenty years which I spent at 32, Addison Mansions, Kensington, during which I was in constant intercourse with most of the best-known writers of the generation." - Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen
This is a study of the physical transformation of Edinburgh in the nineteenth century.