King Leopold

In 1898, Edmund Morel, an employee of a Liverpool shipping line, was in Antwerp watching ships arriving from the Congo laden with rubber and ivory, but taking only soldiers, firearms and ammunition back to Africa. He realized that there was nothing traded for the Congolese goods: they had been produced by slave labor. Hochschild tells the horrific story of King Leopold's Congo and describes how Morel mobilized public opinion to combat slavery in the Belgian colony.