King Leopold's Ghost
Adam Hochschild · 1998
Leopold II of Belgium extracted rubber from the Congo through a reign of terror that killed 10 million people, and almost nobody knows about it. Hochschild recovered this forgotten atrocity and shaped a narrative of such moral clarity that it revived the debate about colonial memory across Europe and Africa.
The case against
Hochschild tells an African atrocity mostly through its European witnesses; Morel and Casement get inner lives while the Congolese dead remain a number, a gap he concedes but cannot fill from the archive. The ten-million death toll is contested among historians of the region. And the thriller pacing sits oddly on the material, horror engineered for page-turning.
Non-Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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