In Land of Tears, historian Robert Harms reconstructs the chaotic process by which the heart of Africa was utterly transformed in the nineteenth century and the rainforest of the Congo River basin became one of the most brutally exploited places on earth. Ranging from remote African villages to European diplomatic meetings to Connecticut piano-key factories, Harms reveals how equatorial Africa became fully, fatefully, and tragically enmeshed within our global world.
In Land of Tears: The Exploration and Exploitation of Equatorial Africa, Yale University Professor Robert Harms deftly and authoritatively recounts the region’s compelling, fascinating, appalling, and tragic history ... This is a thoughtful and deeply researched book that makes for gripping, if sometimes uncomfortable, reading. This is history at its best: authoritative, insightful, and engaging ... History usually casts a long shadow. The legacy of the roughly 80 years of colonial rule still haunts equatorial Africa. One can only hope that Professor Harms will tell the next part of the story as vividly and effectively as he has told the first.
Robert Harms tells this epic as an important chapter in the history of the world ... Harms' description of Equatorial African slavery appears both familiar and elsewhere unfamiliar to students of the contemporary American institution ... Harms carries the reader along swiftly, as a great adventure story will, with easy prose that leaves out nothing of the character of the world described.
Fresh interpretation of the 19th-century race to colonize the interior of sub-Saharan Africa ... An exemplary work of history and a somber account of a colonial enterprise that has crippled Africa to this day.
