How Did Leopold II Contribute To Imperialism

King Leopold II Leopold II was the second king of Belgium. He was born on 9th April 1835, at Brussels. He was the eldest surviving son of King Leopold I and Louise od Orleans. He succeeded his father to the Belgian throne in 1865 and reigned for 44 years until his death. He was the longest reign of any Belgian monarch. Leopold was the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken on his own behalf. For which he took help of explorer Henry Morton Stanley to lay claim to the Congo, an area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although he played a significant role in the development of the modern Belgian state, he was also responsible for widespread atrocities committed under his rule against his

The effects were devastating. Many of the women hostages starved, and many of the male rubber gatherers were worked to death. Thousands of Congolese fled their villages to avoid being impressed as forced laborer’s, and they sought refuge deep in the forest, where there were little food and shelter. Tens of thousands of others were shot down in failed rebellions against the regime. With women as hostages and men forced to tap rubber, few able-bodied adults were left to hunt, fish, and cultivate crops. No one will ever know the precise figures, but, from all these causes, demographers estimate that between 1880 and 1920 the population of the Congo may have been slashed by up to 50 percent, from perhaps 20 million people at the beginning of that period to an estimated 10 million at the

Because the system’s effects in the Congo could so easily be blamed on one man, who could safely be attacked because he did not represent a great power, an international outcry focused on Leopold. That pressure finally forced him to relinquish his ownership of the territory, and it became the Belgian Congo in 1908. Leopold, however, made the Belgian government pay him for his prized possession. He died the following year. Because his only son had predeceased him, Leopold’s nephew Albert I succeeded to the throne. By the end of his life, Leopold was unpopular with his people, but, ironically, that had much less to do with his actions in Africa than with his conduct of his personal life. He spoke contemptuously of Belgium’s small size, could not speak proper Dutch, the native language of more than half of its citizens, spent long winters in luxurious quarters on the French Riviera, and was estranged from two of his three