I think I am going to spend my Memorial Day weekend writing about history. And it’s not going to be about the nice bits of history, either. I have been holding off on a number of these reviews because sometimes the subject matter was just a little too depressing.
At best, we are dealing with a conga line of arseholes. At best. And at worst? Well, we’re dealing with some pretty bad ‘at worsts’ here…
The first book is Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. To get the positives out of the way here, this book is superbly written. It’s just a pity that the subject matter is so dire. The book details the establishment of the Congo Free State by Belgium’s King Leopold II—and death and destruction that followed. Mid-way through the 19th Century, many of the monarchs of Europe were still very much preoccupied with both expansion and empire (and to be fair, some Americans as well), and although Belgium was not one of the greatest powers at the time, that didn’t really didn’t put a dampener on their ambitions. The African continent was always seen as a rich pickings to these people, and like so many of his contemporaries, Leopold was mostly concerned with getting in first and nabbing as much filthy lucre as possible. The fates of the people already living there were not really a huge concern to him. You could loot a place for its wealth, mutilate and kill the populace and if news doesn’t get back home about it, no one will care.
Unrestrained greed is one hell of a drug.
Like many bastards, and he was a pretty big one, Leopold was a man capable of putting on a very charming facade. He was also a very smooth political operator and propagandist, painting himself as a leader whose “civilising influence would counter the practices of the dreadful ‘Arab’ slave-traders.” His political maundering worked alarmingly well—especially on the Americans. And he needed their support. Much of this came through a third party, Henry Shelton Sanford, who would be best described as Leopold’s man in Washington. Without his intervention, the Congo Free State may never have come to pass.
But not everyone had blinkers over their eyes. There were objectors; men willing to go against the grain. The thing about mass atrocities is that due their size, someone is going to notice eventually. And it doesn’t have to be noticed by people of great importance—even the little man can have big voice. One of the first people to start documenting the Congolese atrocities was George Washington Williams, a black baptist minister and prolific writer who documented the horrors of the regime in a flurry of letters to not just the public and the US government, but to the King himself. Which, I have to be honest, was pretty ballsy. Another voice was that of Reverend William H. Sheppard, who had originally travelled to the Congo to preach to the indigenous peoples. He was compelled to speak—at great risk to himself, as a black missionary—after witnessing of the mutilations carried out by the Kasai Rubber Company. This would later get him in hot water, but thankfully by that point he had the message out.
One of the greatest figures though comes from a very unexpected place. E.D. Morel, a clerk at a British shipping company, was compelled to dive into the goings on in the Congo Free State when he realised that not only did the accounting regarding Congo shipments not make sense, but there were reports if an awful lot of men with ammunition being shipped out for what was meant to be just a trade expedition. The realisation that the supposed trade with the Congo was just bullshit and lies lead to Morel quitting his job, going on the assault, and becoming an advocate of human rights. Alongside Morel, Irishman Roger Casement worked to expose the horrors to the British government, turning them against Belgium. Both were aided by early advances in mass media—photos splashed across the pages of newspapers proved to be very impactful.
And who can forget Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness?
Leopold’s incursion into the Congo probably led to the deaths of over 15 million people. I just called it Leopold’s incursion, but the man himself never actually set foot in the region where all these horrors were carried out in his name. He did it from a safe distance—both physically and mentally—away in Europe, where he thought he couldn’t be touched. But the same propaganda tools that he used to twist things into his favour ended up helping to bring him down. It’s almost a modern story in a way—without the telegraph or the photograph, things could have turned out very differently.
For the next book, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple, we have another account of how unrestrained greed can cause cataclysms. One of the greatest transfers of wealth in modern history occurred when the East India Company came to seize control over most of the Indian sub-continent in less than 50 years, and The Anarchy details how exactly that came to pass.
Like King Leopold’s Ghost, The Anarchy is not a happy book. And like King Leopold’s Ghost, this book is also masterfully written. It also contains multiple photographs that were not served well by my ebook copy. One of the most pressing misconceptions I had about this time period before reading The Anarchy was that the East India Company (The EIC or The Company) had a degree of planning to its takeover. And the answer to that is, no, not really? Yes, there were some cunning operators, but a lot of the success seen by the The Company was due to serendipity. The path of trade-to-conquest would not have been so smooth if the Mughals weren’t dealing with their own issues. It is not ridiculous to think that if India’s internal turmoil was not running at a rollicking boil at the time, this group of Brits (with 35 permanent employees at their home office) wouldn’t have had a chance. But with the Mughal State fractured as it was, there was room for opportunity. And they took it.
The Company was established in 1599, and until the 1750s, it mainly dealt with asiatic trade. However, the Company’s, shall we say, ‘conquest’ of India didn’t really start until Battle of Plassey. And this is where I leant that Robert Clive—Clive of India, the curry powder Clive—was an absolute bastard. And the author is not afraid to show it. The rise of Clive though was not so much backed by London but by Bengali bankers, who wanted to see the local Nawab knocked out of his seat (To be fair, this guy is another bastard). But this deposition lead to a straight out pillage of Bengal. The founding charter of the Company did say it was authorised it to “wage war” if it had to—but who would have guessed what would have been used for back in 1599?
This lack of unity and sneaky support from certain groups within India would continue to serve the Company. But so did a number of other things, including cozying up to certain parties back in Britain, and their ability to pay their bills. Indulging in blatant asset stripping made the Company very wealthy, and with that wealth, they could pay sepoys far more than any of their rivals could. This meant that even when the local forces improved their military tactics, the Company had the upper hand.
But not everything was smooth sailing. The hasty stripping Bengal lead to a famine—which any normal person would care about. But it also lead to an almost inevitable crash in the Company’s share prices, which was the only thing the shareholders cared about. In turn, this resulted in the first government bailout of entity too big to fail, and the ousting of Governor-General, Warren Hastings. Hastings was not great person (but one the author has some sympathy for, despite the whole famine thing). However, he at least some interest in Indian culture. The men that came afterwards didn’t give the Indians as much thought as Hastings, and they were much more militarily minded to boot. This pivot was very reactionary and not really planned by the shareholders. But after the bailout, the Government started pulling in the reigns and the Company started to lose its merchant base. The book ends not with the loss of the Company’s monopoly on India, which happened a few decades after the bailout, but with the fall of Delhi in 1803. I guess that’s a side effect of the more Mughal based focus, but I wouldn’t have minded a few years more.
Despite this, the acts of the Company can still be seen as “the supreme act of corporate violence in world history,” while the epilogue makes it clear that there are more than a few links between the birth of the corporation and the birth of 19th century colonialism. It’s a fascinating part of history that had some dreadful consequences, that, like the events in the Congo, have parallels that we can still see today.
…Now that I’ve written these, I feel like I should have done them in historical order and not reading order. The corporate greed of the latter would have influenced the events of the former. There was also going to be a third book this evening, but I might let that stand on its own—it deals with a different breed of terrible.
