King Leopold's Ghost

A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in the Congo. In the late 1890s Edmund Morel, a young British shipping company official became suspicious that ships which had arrived laden with rubber and ivory from King Leopold II of Belgium's new colony, returned empty. Horrified, he realised that there could be only one source for the lucrative cargo: slave labour on a vast scale. Abandoning his job, Morel almost single-handedly made the Congo's slave-labour regime and its atrocities into a cause which would unite the whole world.