The Congo Free State.
Twenty-three years of personal rule.

This is the most morally difficult volume in the library. The Congo Free State is, on any reasonable accounting, the worst single colonial regime documented in the modern period — worse in proportional demographic effect than any other European colonial system, including the Spanish in the Americas (the Spanish-period demographic catastrophe was epidemiological; the Congo Free State catastrophe was policy-driven), worse than the Belgian-Congo successor state after 1908 (which moderated some practices though continued others), worse than its immediate African colonial contemporaries (the French Equatorial Africa concessions, the German East Africa colony, the Portuguese Mozambique system) by a margin on the available evidence. The state operated for twenty-three years. Across its twenty-three years the population of the territory is generally estimated to have fallen by somewhere between three and thirteen million, with ten million the best-known figure — an estimate of decline from killing, starvation, disease and collapsed birth rates together, not a body count. Chapter IX sets out how those numbers are arrived at and how far they can be trusted. It transferred, in the same period, perhaps a billion gold francs to its European proprietors. It is the case study, in the modern international system, of what was possible in the conditions of late-nineteenth-century European imperialism with no effective external oversight.

The volume's chapters cover: Leopold II's strategic preparation through the International African Association of 1876-1884; the Berlin Conference recognition of 1884-1885; the conquest and administration of the territory under Henry Morton Stanley and the Force Publique; the rubber-quota system that produced the demographic catastrophe; the international reform campaign led by E. D. Morel and the British consul Roger Casement; the Belgian annexation of 1908; the demographic and ethnographic accounting of the toll; and the long memory of the Free State period in Congolese national consciousness, in Belgian public memory (recently re-examined), and in international colonial historiography.

The volume's editorial position is that the Congo Free State must be described accurately and that romanticisation, denial, and minimisation of its character should be rejected. The position is, after a century of evasion in Belgian and broader European public memory, no longer contested in the serious historical literature. It deserves to be reflected in popular and tourist-orientated treatments of the country, which is one of the things this volume tries to provide.