King Leopold's Ghost

Of all the great atrocities etched on to the conscience of the modern era there is one that stands largely forgotten. At the turn of the last century, King Leopold II of Belgium, driven by an insatiable lust for wealth and empire, unleashed a reign of terror on the vast swathe of land he had claimed as his personal fiefdom surrounding the Congo River. The fight to expose this horror not only triggered the 20th century’s first major human rights movement but also one of its defining novels, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In a gripping history, Adam Hochschild reveals the truth behind both, recounting the extraordinary story of a power-crazed monarch whose bottomless avarice was only matched only by the courage of those who sought to expose him.

A GRIPPING HISTORY
Hochschild introduces a cast of heroes and villains worthy of any Shakespearean drama. We follow the impassioned campaigner Edmund Morel, who, after stumbling across Leopold’s scheme, abandoned his shipping career to become "the greatest British investigative journalist of his time." His tireless quest to unmask the Belgium king united thousands on both sides of the Atlantic, enlisting such notable voices as Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and Arthur Conan Doyle. Among the army of morally bankrupt administrators and military men complicit in the oppression was Henry Morton Stanley, the most famous explorer of his day. He appears here as a "world-class obfuscator," obsessed by his own celebrity, and a willing victim to Leopold’s manipulation. Elsewhere, travelling by steamboat in 1890, a young Joseph Conrad’s "view on human nature was permanently changed" by the murderous greed he witnessed on the banks of the Congo Delta; experiences that inspired him to pen one of literature’s most iconic, and terrorizing, works of fiction. Hochschild peels away the layers of fiction from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as he traces the true identity of the book’s murderous anti-hero, Kurtz.

Published in 1999, less than 100 years after the demise of Leopold’s Congo, Hochschild examines why this shameful tragedy of human rights so quickly faded from public memory, and how the ferocious public relations war fought on its behalf, mired in lobbying, deviousness, sex and celebrity, is so "strikingly close to our time." This Folio edition includes a new selection of 24 pages of researched images, showing all the story’s key players, as well as the African victims Leopold was so determined to hide from public view. Included is a pictorial slipcase, and a binding adorned with two elephant tusks, a somber reminder of the trade that cost so many millions of lives.

Three-quarter-bound in blocked cloth with a printed front board
Set in Bulmer
416 pages
Frontispiece and 24 pages of colour and black & white plates
12 integrated black & white illustrations
1 map
Pictorial slipcase
9½" x 6¼"