The RAC shipped more enslaved Africans to the Americas than any other company in the history of the Atlantic slave trade and was owned entirely by the British Crown. From 1672 to 1752, the Royal Africa Company had the monopoly over the slave trade. This scholarship on the “high moral purpose” of the civilizing mission of Europe was especially robust in the analysis of the relationship between Britain and Africa. It was significant that Hochschild was not an academic historian, because the mainstream historians continued to produce books that showed how colonialism with royal patronage was progressive for the Global South. Queen Victoria and 19th century liberal historians had already perfected the story of spreading Christianity, civilization, and commerce. The current historical evidence of the state of the Congo is the best testament to that falsehood about the civilizing mission. In the case of King Leopold II, a very large museum was built to commemorate the civilizing work of Belgium and how the Congo was transformed into a “model colony”. In the last chapter of the book, Hochschild wrote of the “Great Forgetting”, the campaign undertaken by state historians to promote the view that monarchs such as King Leopold led the selfless mission to spread democracy and civilization. It was British historians who honed the propaganda machinery to spread jingoism among the British workers, utilizing the monarchy as the foil for stability and continuity. With their feudal monarchy as the anchor for power, exploitation and violence, the British had practiced the arts of pillage, kidnapping, slavery, genocide and colonialism much longer and more efficiently than the Belgians or the Portuguese. Yet, compared to the British, the Belgians were novices as managers of the historical narrative. Adam Hochschild’s book, King Leopold’s Ghost: A story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa documented the brutal killing of more than 10 million Congolese and the crimes of the Belgian monarch and the Belgian state. It took nearly one hundred years after the passing of King Leopold II of Belgium for the atrocities committed by the Belgian King to come to the mainstream of European history.
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