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

Amazon.com Price:  $5.83 (as of 06/05/2019 06:42 PST- Details)

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many pages underlined
King Leopold of Belgium, writes historian Adam Hochschild on this grim history, didn’t much take care of his place of origin or his subjects, all of which he dismissed as “small country, small people.” Even so, he searched the globe to find a colony for Belgium, frantic that the scramble of other European powers for in a foreign country dominions in Africa and Asia would leave nothing for himself or his people. When he ultimately found a suitable location in what would change into the Belgian Congo, later referred to as Zaire and now simply as Congo, Leopold set about establishing a rule of terror that would culminate in the deaths of 4 to 8 million indigenous people, “a death toll,” Hochschild writes, “of Holocaust dimensions.” Folks that survived went to work mining ore or harvesting rubber, yielding a fortune for the Belgian king, who salted away billions of dollars in hidden bank accounts right through the world. Hochschild’s fine book of historical inquiry, which draws heavily on eyewitness accounts of the colonialists’ savagery, brings this little-studied episode in European and African history into new light. –Gregory McNamee

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