King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed

This history recounts how Leopold II of Belgium turned the Congo basin into a personal extractive state in the late nineteenth century. Hochschild follows the rubber and ivory regime, the Force Publique, and the mutilations and hostages used to enforce quotas. Against Leopold he sets the Black American observer George Washington Williams, the shipping clerk Edmund Morel, the consul Roger Casement, and missionaries who documented the system. The book traces the public campaign that forced a transfer of the territory and asks what records and silences remain. It is a narrative history of colonial extraction and protest, not a novel and not a full survey of later Congolese politics.

Bound in light brown title blocked cloth with a picture printed paper cover. Brown slipcase printed with a monochrome wrap-around photo.