King Leopold's Ghost Book Analysis Term Paper

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King Leopold's Ghost By Adam Hochschild

This is a short analysis of the content and historical merit of King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild. It has 2 sources.

Adam Hochschild is a Journalism teacher at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written several books, with many of them having a central theme of megalomania and the subversion of the rights of the many by the few. He appears to have a fascination with good and evil, and what drives men to do unexpectedly evil or heroic things.

These concerns of his are foremost in "King Leopold's Ghost - A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa." It is an account of what befell the nation now known as Congo during the years of Belgian colonial rule in the early years of the twentieth century.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was becoming a commonly accepted belief among the European powers that colonial possessions enhanced the prestige of the nations that held them. King Leopold II, wishing to elevate Belgium to a higher status in the European community of nations, had his eyes upon Africa. Of course, there were also more practical reasons to play the imperial game, namely to build personal wealth and to accumulate personal power. With the major colonial states more interested in the coastal African states, Leopold managed to colonize the Congo, using public statements about his humanitarian concerns for the slave trade in the Congo and the drive to spread Christianity in the area to disguise his real intentions.

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The new colony that Leopold now controlled was immense, over 76 times as large as Belgium. The area was also rich in many resources, such as rubber, which was increasingly in demand as the motor vehicle became more and more widespread as a mode of transport.

Hochschild details the colonization and subsequent subjugation of the Congolese through a succession of biographical sketches of the principal villains and heroes, the former being Leopold's accomplices and the latter his opponents. He describes the genocidal plundering of the Congo, the looting of its resources, primarily ivory and rubber, and the brutalization of its people by Leopold, which ultimately slashed the population of the region by ten million and sparked a global human rights outcry.

The book is not a mainstream scholarly work, as its style is designed to appeal more to a non-scholarly reader, with several plot digressions which would make it a curious work for pure historical insight. Also, there are many similarities with Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," and many references to it, which detract to some extent from the factual nature of the information being conveyed in the book.

The book does, however, succeed admirably in enlightening people who have no foreknowledge of….....

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