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

In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, 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 c...show more

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366 pages

Average rating: 8.47

17 RATINGS

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3 REVIEWS

Community Reviews

PeterA23
Jul 09, 2023
8/10 stars
I reread the American-born writer Adam Hochschild’s 1999’s edition of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Hochschild’s monograph was responsible for putting the humanitarian crisis of the Belgian King Leopold II’s Congo Free State and the first “great human rights movement” of the 20th Century (back cover of the monograph) back in the public imagination. Hochschild’s monograph is both a study of the cri...read more
oh_let3
May 16, 2023
8/10 stars
haunting
Trisha B
Apr 30, 2022
9/10 stars
Eye opening, tragic

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