Just six years earlier, in Washington, D.C., he had lobbied the U.S. Williams made for an unlikely whistleblower. Incredibly, this same organization now claimed that purchases it had made in the Congo region gave it political control over a territory estimated at more than one million square miles in dimension.4 The territory amounted to an area eighty-three times the size of Belgium, or almost four times the size of France.5 It also, Williams added, rested on a gigantic lie. It was, to quote one diplomat, “an anomaly and a monstrosity”: “a curious case of abnormal birth” that Europeans and Africans alike strugg led to explain.3 Before the Independent State had become the world’s newest government, Williams told Harrison, it had begun in the 1870s as a modest private association run not from the Congo, or even from another part of Africa, but from the Château de Laeken, a royal palace outside of Brussels, Belgium. On behalf of several newspapers, he was investigating some five hundred treaties by which indigenous leaders had allegedly sold their sovereignty-a European concept usually associated with supreme rulership over a place’s land and people.2 The buyer of this unusual bounty, located along the Congo River, was the Independent State of the Congo. N OCTOBER 1890, George Washington Williams wrote to President Benjamin Harrison about what he called “one of the foulest crimes of modern diplomatic history.”1 Williams, an African American historian in his forties, had just spent several months in the heart of Central Africa. Introduction 1 1 The Man Who Bought a Country 11 2 The Emergence of an Idea 52 3 King Leopold’s Borneo 84 4 Bismarck’s Borneo 131 5 The Berlin Conference 166 Epilogue: Afterlives 219 Notes 253 Acknowl edgments 357 Index 359 To my parents, Michael, Deborah, and David | Berlin West Africa Conference (1884–1885 : Berlin, Germany) | Europe-Colonies- Administration-H istory. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Description: Cambridge, Massac husetts : Harvard University Press, 2017. Title: Rogue empires : contracts and conmen in Europe’s scramble for Africa / Steven Press. Rogue Empires CONTRACTS AND CONMEN IN EUR OPE ’ S SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICAĬambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2017Ĭopyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Press, Steven, author.
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