Land of Tears: The Exploration and Exploitation of Equatorial Africa
Robert Harms$29.75
$35.00
A prizewinning historian's epic account of the scramble to control equatorial Africa
In just three decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the heart of Africa was utterly transformed. Virtually closed to outsiders for centuries, by the early 1900s the rainforest of the Congo River basin was one of the most brutally exploited places on earth. In Land of Tears, historian Robert Harms reconstructs the chaotic process by which this happened. Beginning in the 1870s, traders, explorers, and empire builders from Arabia, Europe, and America moved rapidly into the region, where they pioneered a deadly trade in ivory and rubber for Western markets and in enslaved labor for the Indian Ocean rim. Imperial conquest followed close behind.
Ranging from remote African villages to European diplomatic meetings to Connecticut piano-key factories, Land of Tears reveals how equatorial Africa became fully, fatefully, and tragically enmeshed within our global world.
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 12/03/2019
ISBN: 9780465028634
Pages: 544
Weight: 1.70lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.00w x 1.80d
Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 11/01/2019
Library Journal 12/01/2019 pg. 95
Publishers Weekly 01/13/2020
Shelf Awareness 01/21/2020
Choice 10/01/2020
In just three decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the heart of Africa was utterly transformed. Virtually closed to outsiders for centuries, by the early 1900s the rainforest of the Congo River basin was one of the most brutally exploited places on earth. In Land of Tears, historian Robert Harms reconstructs the chaotic process by which this happened. Beginning in the 1870s, traders, explorers, and empire builders from Arabia, Europe, and America moved rapidly into the region, where they pioneered a deadly trade in ivory and rubber for Western markets and in enslaved labor for the Indian Ocean rim. Imperial conquest followed close behind.
Ranging from remote African villages to European diplomatic meetings to Connecticut piano-key factories, Land of Tears reveals how equatorial Africa became fully, fatefully, and tragically enmeshed within our global world.
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 12/03/2019
ISBN: 9780465028634
Pages: 544
Weight: 1.70lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.00w x 1.80d
Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 11/01/2019
Library Journal 12/01/2019 pg. 95
Publishers Weekly 01/13/2020
Shelf Awareness 01/21/2020
Choice 10/01/2020