Analysis Of King Leopold's Ghost
Summary of the text: Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa is a historical fiction published in 1998 (Hochschild, 1998). It comprises a myriad of evidence to testify the Belgian King Leopold II’s atrocities in Congo between 1885 and 1908 for the sake of capturing the attention of various readers towards the Belgian imperialist delinquencies through a detailed narration of a number of main characters’, including George Washington Williams and William Henry Sheppard, experiences in Belgian Congo (Hochschild, 1998). In this excerpt, it illustrates William’s peaceful exploration in Congo as the first American-Black missionary. During his journey, not only did he explore the Congolese culture, …show more content…
With reference to the storyline, owing to technological improvement after the Industrial Revolution, rubber has become prevalently adopted in a great variety of industries (Hochschild, 1998). Nonetheless, thanks to the mass production of several rubber commodities, for instances, tires, rubber insulation for electronic devices, hoses and so forth, a shortage of rubber, which led to a dramatic price increase, emerged (Hochschild, 1998). It is unambiguous that various imperialists started exploring more rubber in other countries so as to ameliorate the shortage of rubber emerging from the growth and rivalry of the European …show more content…
As Foster (2006) analyzed, on account that the transitional government were not entitled to sign any long term oil contracts, the US government had to strengthen its geopolitical influence in the region. Expectedly, the US’ privatization of the Iraqi oil enterprises after a year denotes the promulgation of neoliberal economic model in Iraq, which guarantees the US’ economic benefit acquired from the oil trade (Foster, 2006). Seeing that the war in Iraq and the privatization of Iraqi oil corporates occurred chronologically, one cannot help but wonder if the US plotted to disguise its bona fide, yet unscrupulous, conspiracy by waging its war on terrorism in the Middle East. As priorly mentioned, detailing the military to maneuver the other country for economic benefits is one of the perquisites to imperialist regime. In the aforementioned warfare, the US not only sent its army to legitimize its sovereignty over Afghanistan and Iraq, but it also conspired to take democratization as an excuse to uncover its real intention of gaining profit. To recapitulate, not only does imperialism exist in Belgian Congo in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but also in Middle-East in the twenty-first
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