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

by Adam Hochschild

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Hochschild reconstructs King Leopold II's personal plunder of the Congo, where forced rubber extraction killed as many as ten million Africans, and recovers the first modern human rights campaign that exposed it. The book argues that the Congo Free State was a template for twentieth-century mass atrocity, and that the coalition of missionaries, shipping clerks, and journalists who fought it pioneered the tools of transnational activism.

Published:: 1998
Pages:: 366

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In the Conversation

In this collection, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa references 2 other books.

It draws on The Lessons of History and Guns, Germs, and Steel.

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What This Book Draws On

The books Hochschild references and why each one mattered to the argument.

Illustrates Durant's Lessons of History observation that freedom and power are perpetually in tension, by tracing how Leopold exploited the rhetoric of civilization to cloak industrial-scale brutality

References

The Lessons of History

by Will Durant

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Supplies a brutal counter-case to Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, showing that the inequalities between Europe and Africa were actively manufactured through violence, not merely the product of geography

References

Guns, Germs, and Steel

by Jared Diamond

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Intellectual Lineage

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Builds on (2 layers deep)

Directly cites

The Lessons of History

Guns, Germs, and Steel

2 steps back

The Origin of Species

The Republic

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