King Leopold's Ghost
by Adam Hochschild
The most profitable atrocity in history. Documented.
you want to understand the Congo — and by extension the entire colonial project — through its most extreme and revealing example
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Between 1885 and 1908 King Leopold II of Belgium ran the Congo as his personal property and presided over the deaths of up to ten million people in the pursuit of rubber. He did it while presenting himself to the world as a humanitarian. Hochschild spent years reconstructing how it happened, who enabled it, and how it was eventually exposed. The most important book about colonialism as a system of organized extraction and violence. Essential reading before Cobalt Red — the two books are a century apart and telling the same story.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Congo • Central Africa
- Voice
- An outside perspective on Congo
- Themes
- True Cost of EmpireAfter Empire
