King Leopolds Ghost
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Africa and the Middle Eastern countries underwent a drastic reformation. They faced internal political battles, the uprising of many economical and cultural struggles but most important of all imperialism. The idea of imperialism is to have a national policy or practice of acquiring foreign territories or establishing dominance over other nations. Rudyard Kipling, a British Indian imperialist poet educated in England, wrote a response to the American takeover of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War called "The White Man's Burden, 1899". In this response Kipling classifies imperialism as something the white society (the United States) has to do without question in order to help teach the natives of the Philippines how to encourage themselves as a population and survive. One of the first European leaders to acquire new African territory was King Leopold II of Belgium, who had long dreamed of creating an empire modeled on Dutch holdings in Asia and the Pacific. When the Belgian government was reluctant to acquire colonies, Leopold took the initiative (McGeehon, Priscilla; Civilization Past & Present, pp.702).
In the story of King Leopold's Ghost, written by Adam Hocheschild, King Leopold II of Belgium's creation of the Congo Free State went into the interior of the economic and political systems established in colonial Africa. Between 1885 and 1908, there were approximately between five and eight million victims of Leopold's personal rule, under a barbarous system of forced labor and systematic terror (his idea of humanitarianism)...