King Leopold’s Ghost

by Adam Hochschild · 1998

In the 1880s, as European powers divided Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium claimed the vast Congo basin as his personal fiefdom. Hochschild chronicles Leopold’s brutal exploitation of the Congo’s rubber and ivory, a regime that caused the deaths of an estimated ten million Africans. The book follows the courageous individuals—British shipping agent Edmund Dene Morel, Irish nationalist Roger Casement, African‑American journalists George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, missionaries, and even a young Joseph Conrad—who exposed the atrocities and sparked the first international human‑rights movement. Combining meticulous research with vivid storytelling, the work reveals how greed, colonialism, and propaganda shaped a forgotten genocide and how a handful of idealists fought to bring it to light.