[2] The book was refused by nine of the ten U.S. publishing houses to which an outline was submitted, but became an unexpected bestseller and won the prestigious Mark Lynton History Prize for literary style.

These labor-intensive industries were serviced by slave labor, and the local peoples were forced to work through various means, including torture, imprisonment, maiming and terror.

Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was fascinated with obtaining a colony and focused upon claiming the interior of Africa—the only unclaimed sizable geographic area.

Moving within the European political paradigm existing in the early 1880s, Leopold gained international concessions and recognition for his personal claim to the Congo Free State.

The Congo was rich in rubber-producing vines, and Leopold transitioned his exploitative focus from dwindling ivory supplies to the burgeoning rubber market.

Murder was common—tribes resisting enslavement were wiped out; administration officials expected to receive back a severed human hand for every bullet issued.

The documentation was not easy to come by; the furnaces of the palace in Brussels are said to have spent more than a week burning incriminating papers before Leopold turned over his private Congo to the Belgian nation.

[8] Richard F. Hamilton, writing in The Washington Post, called it an excellent book to counteract "the great forgetting" of the Congo atrocities.

Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, a Congolese scholar whose Histoire générale du Congo was published the same year as King Leopold's Ghost, estimated the death toll in the Free State era and its aftermath at roughly 13 million (which Ndaywel è Nziem has subsequently revised downward to 10 million, the same number as Hochschild's conclusion).

"[4] Other historians have painted a picture similar to Hochschild's of the high death toll in Leopold's Congo, among them Jan Vansina, who appeared in the documentary based on the book, and the demographer Léon de Saint-Moulin [ln].

"[16] Hochschild does not use the word genocide, but describes how the mass deaths happened as a result of the forced labor system instituted at Leopold's direction.

[5] King Leopold's Ghost was specifically singled out for praise by the American Historical Association when it gave Hochschild its Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award in 2008.

[17] In an article published by The American Conservative, political scientist Bruce Gilley was highly critical of the accuracy of the book and defended colonialism.