This is deep background reading for study of Heart of Darkness, and for all of Conrad's oeuvre, given the determinative role that his Congo experience played in his development as a writer and as an ethical thinker. He was an eyewitness to colonialism at its 19th century worst, the rapacious Belgians and other Europeans who descended upon the Congo region bringing an African holocaust lately exposed by Adam Hochschild in King Leopold's Ghost.