Folio Society Published Works Number 2416
Pakenham, Thomas - The Scramble for Africa
We buy and sell items like these, so please contact us if you have similar items for sale, and we will make you an offer if we are interested.
To check if we have this item, or similar items, in stock, please click the Check Stock link below. Alternatively, use the links on the left to search our large online database of items for sale, or to visit the rest of the site.
Check Stock
Pakenham, Thomas - The Scramble for Africa (Published in by The Folio Society in 2011. Introduced by Saul David. Two volumes. Three-quarter-bound in buckram with printed paper sides. 1,032 pages in total. Frontispiece. 24 pages of colour and black & white plates per volume. Book Size: 10 × 6.75 ins. On 7 January 1876, The Times was delivered to the breakfast table of King Leopold II of Belgium. In it, he read the report of a Lieutenant Cameron, who had just finished an arduous three-year journey across the largely uncharted African interior, nearly dying in the process. At the time Africa was widely assumed to be barren and inhospitable, but Cameron described a 'magnificent and healthy country of unspeakable richness' ripe for some 'enterprising capitalist that might take the matter in hand'. Leopold had been seeking a suitable colony for Belgium for over a decade, and saw his opportunity. The Scramble for Africa had begun. Within half a generation all 10 million square miles of the African 'cake', along with 110 million bewildered new subjects, had been sliced up between five powers – Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Portugal – and one individual, Leopold himself. He created the Belgian colony of Congo by stealth, under the guise of an 'international association', and treated the country, with its lucrative rubber industry, as his private property and its population as his slaves. This two-volume edition contains 48 pages of illustrations including paintings, photographs, caricatures and cartoons. In a new introduction, broadcaster and author Saul David, who has written several books on Britain's colonial wars, brings the story of Africa up to date and shows that the legacy of the Scramble is still with us today. )
