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King Leopold's Ghost
A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
In King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild reconstructs the creation of the Congo Free State, the privately controlled Central African territory ruled by Belgium’s King Leopold II from 1885 to 1908. Promoted internationally as a humanitarian and antislavery project, the regime became an extractive system built around ivory, rubber, forced labor, hostage-taking, military coercion, and carefully managed propaganda. Hochschild follows both the people who helped construct this system and those who exposed it, including George Washington Williams, William Henry Sheppard, Roger Casement, E. D. Morel, and Alice Seeley Harris. The book is therefore not only an account of colonial brutality but also a history of political concealment and organized protest. By connecting corporate interests, royal ambition, racial ideology, missionary testimony, journalism, photography, and international activism, Hochschild shows how distant violence was made profitable, how evidence of it reached the wider worl…