King Leopold's Congo, 1886–1908

Abstract

The Congo Independent State, under the personal government of King Leopold, lasted from 1885 to 1908. In the first years of existence of the Congo State, when only a tiny part of the territory of the state was occupied, Leopold tried to extend his frontiers in all directions. In the early years the prosperity of the administration depended on the relations between the administrator and the local African authorities, including the balance of physical power. Districts in turn were sub-divided into posts, of which there were 183 by 1900. The grass roots organisation was provided by the 1891 decree on chiefs. These were appointed by the administration as an area came under occupation. At first the growth of the Congo State was accompanied by the development of traditional commercial companies. The Congo State was anxious to promote agriculture, but its economic policies in effect prevented this.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.