# Adam Hochschild American journalist and historian, co-founder of *Mother Jones*, and author of ***[[King Leopold's Ghost]]*** (1998) — the book that made the [[Congo Free State]] widely known in English. Nine of ten American publishers rejected the manuscript. It then won the Mark Lynton History Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize and sold over 600,000 copies in a dozen languages. His durable contribution is arguably not the atrocity narrative but the **recovery of the reform campaign** — [[E. D. Morel]] reading shipping manifests, [[Roger Casement]]'s 1903 journey, the [[Congo Reform Association]]'s atrocity photography — as the origin of modern human-rights advocacy. That story was substantially forgotten in English before he told it. His headline mortality figure of **roughly 10 million** is the contested one, and he is more careful about it than his critics allow: he has explicitly rejected the genocide label, on the ground that "a forced labor system, although it may be equally deadly, is different." See [[Congo Free State Mortality Debate]]. His other books include *Bury the Chains* on the British abolitionist movement, *To End All Wars* on First World War resisters, and *Spain in Our Hearts*. The through-line is consistent and worth noting: **he writes about the people who organised against atrocities, not only about the atrocities** — which is why the Congo book is structured around Morel and Casement rather than around Leopold. ## See also [[King Leopold's Ghost]] · [[Congo Free State]] · [[Congo Free State Mortality Debate]] · [[E. D. Morel]] · [[Roger Casement]] · [[Congo Reform Association]]