Author: Adam Hochschild
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1760785202
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474
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Book Description
With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. . While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize in 1999, King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of this man’s brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. It is also the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.
Author: Kevin Grant
Publisher: Macmillan Higher Education
ISBN: 1319054153
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
This book introduces students to the history of the Congolese peoples and the Congo Free State, ruled by King Leopold II of Belgium between 1885 and 1908. It illuminates central issues in the study of the era of the "new imperialism" and challenges students to analyze a variety of different kinds of sources in building their own historical arguments about the period. The introduction provides an overview of the Congolese peoples, the environment in which they lived, and the process through which the Congo Free State was established and developed. The documents invite students to explore the history of the Congo Free State through speeches, international treaties, oral histories, investigative depositions on atrocities, visual texts, official and private correspondence, parliamentary debates, and published exposés. Document headnotes, a chronology, and analytical questions help students to place the Congo Free State in the context of not only the new imperialism but also its larger global context.
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: LeftWord Books
ISBN: 818749655X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 98
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Book Description
Dear, dear, when the soft-hearts get hold of thing like that missionary's contribution they completely lose their tranquility they speak profanely and reproach Heaven for allowing such a find to live. Meaning me . They think it irregular. They go shuddering around, brooding over the reduction of that Congo population from 25,000,000 to 15,000,000 in the twenty years of my administration; then they burst out and call me the King with Ten Million Murders on his Soul. They call me a 'record'. - From King Leopold's Soliloquy
Author:
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Author: Henry Wellington Wack
Publisher: New York : Putnam
ISBN:
Category : Belgium
Languages : en
Pages : 870
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Book Description
Author: Roger Casement
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3734043476
Category : Fiction
Languages : fr
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Reproduction of the original: The Casement Report by Roger Casement
Author: Matthew G. Stanard
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803239882
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
Belgium was a small, neutral country without a colonial tradition when King Leopold II ceded the Congo, his personal property, to the state in 1908. For the next half century Belgium not only ruled an African empire but also, through widespread, enduring, and eagerly embraced propaganda, produced an imperialist-minded citizenry. Selling the Congo is a study of European pro-empire propaganda in Belgium, with particular emphasis on the period 1908–60. Matthew G. Stanard questions the nature of Belgian imperialism in the Congo and considers the Belgian case in light of literature on the French, British, and other European overseas empires. Comparing Belgium to other imperial powers, the book finds that pro-empire propaganda was a basic part of European overseas expansion and administration during the modern period. Arguing against the long-held belief that Belgians were merely “reluctant imperialists,” Stanard demonstrates that in fact many Belgians readily embraced imperialistic propaganda. Selling the Congo contributes to our understanding of the effectiveness of twentieth-century propaganda by revealing its successes and failures in the Belgian case. Many readers familiar with more-popular histories of Belgian imperialism will find in this book a deeper examination of European involvement in central Africa during the colonial era.
Author: Nancy Rose Hunt
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822375249
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
In A Nervous State, Nancy Rose Hunt considers the afterlives of violence and harm in King Leopold’s Congo Free State. Discarding catastrophe as narrative form, she instead brings alive a history of colonial nervousness. This mood suffused medical investigations, security operations, and vernacular healing movements. With a heuristic of two colonial states—one "nervous," one biopolitical—the analysis alternates between medical research into birthrates, gonorrhea, and childlessness and the securitization of subaltern "therapeutic insurgencies." By the time of Belgian Congo’s famed postwar developmentalist schemes, a shining infertility clinic stood near a bleak penal colony, both sited where a notorious Leopoldian rubber company once enabled rape and mutilation. Hunt’s history bursts with layers of perceptibility and song, conveying everyday surfaces and daydreams of subalterns and colonials alike. Congolese endured and evaded forced labor and medical and security screening. Quick-witted, they stirred unease through healing, wonder, memory, and dance. This capacious medical history sheds light on Congolese sexual and musical economies, on practices of distraction, urbanity, and hedonism. Drawing on theoretical concepts from Georges Canguilhem, Georges Balandier, and Gaston Bachelard, Hunt provides a bold new framework for teasing out the complexities of colonial history.
Author: J. P. Daughton
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393541029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
The epic story of the Congo-Océan railroad and the human costs and contradictions of modern empire. The Congo-Océan railroad stretches across the Republic of Congo from Brazzaville to the Atlantic port of Pointe-Noir. It was completed in 1934, when Equatorial Africa was a French colony, and it stands as one of the deadliest construction projects in history. Colonial workers were subjects of an ostensibly democratic nation whose motto read “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” but liberal ideals were savaged by a cruelly indifferent administrative state. African workers were forcibly conscripted and separated from their families, and subjected to hellish conditions as they hacked their way through dense tropical foliage—a “forest of no joy”; excavated by hand thousands of tons of earth in order to lay down track; blasted their way through rock to construct tunnels; or risked their lives building bridges over otherwise impassable rivers. In the process, they suffered disease, malnutrition, and rampant physical abuse, likely resulting in at least 20,000 deaths. In the Forest of No Joy captures in vivid detail the experiences of the men, women, and children who toiled on the railroad, and forces a reassessment of the moral relationship between modern industrialized empires and what could be called global humanitarian impulses—the desire to improve the lives of people outside of Europe. Drawing on exhaustive research in French and Congolese archives, a chilling documentary record, and heartbreaking photographic evidence, J.P. Daughton tells the epic story of the Congo-Océan railroad, and in doing so reveals the human costs and contradictions of modern empire.
Author: Michael N. Barnett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108836798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Explores the fluctuating relationship between human rights and humanitarianism and the changing nature of the politics and practices of humanity.
