In King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild chronicles the “discovery” and conquest of the Congo Free State, a massive expanse of central Africa that fell und the dominion of King Leopold of Belgium. Unlike most of the colonies obtained before and during the scramble for Africa, the Congo was not colonized by a country or empire, but by a single man. This state of affairs is made more bizarre by the fact that King Leopold never set foot in his colony, nor did he care much about it besides as a source of money and prestige.
There's no question that Leopold was an awful man, even by the standards of his day, but he was by no means a stupid one. The book describes the deft maneuverings that allowed a single man--a king, yes, but a king from a parliamentary democracy who's power was dwarfed by those of evenother royals whose rule was mostly ceremonial--to acquire a tract of land nearly half the size of Euripe over which he exerted absolute power.
The book has it's heroes, too. Chief among them us E.D. Morel, a shipping clerk who, after casually observing the flow of goods in and out of the Congo, deduced the presence of slavery in the colony and devoted his life, almost on a whim, to the wholesale elimination of this odious practice. The book is no hagiography, and Hochschild openly describes some of Morel's faults, but he remains a remarkable and principled man.
The book's perspective is predominantly European, resulting from the indifference to local African voices at the time the events, but Hochschild makes a good effort to include them where he can. His prose is sleek and engaging, and he paints rich pictures of the many characters in his story.