King Leopold's Imperialism and the Origins of the Belgian Colonial Party, 1860–1905

Abstract

The historiography on the imperialism of Leopold II is hardly a blank page. It was, above all, Jean Stengers, for a long time Belgium’s most eminent imperial historian, who made the difference. Stengers’s interpretation of Leopold’s imperialism is mainly summed up in two important articles: “King Leopold’s Imperialism” (which appeared in a volume published in 1975 and devoted to economic theories of imperialism, a hot topic at the time),1 and “La genese d’une pensee coloniale: Leopold II et le modele hollandais” (1977).2 Stengers’s reading of Leopold is clear enough: “What he was after was not political grandeur but economic advantage.” The king wanted “to reap maximum profit,” above all in its “most old-fashioned form” of “the spoils of efficient exploitation,” direct revenue obtained through forced labor—in other words, “pillage.”3 However, Leopold did this not to enrich himself but out of patriotism, to ensure the prosperity and the embellishment of his country. It was “a will to exploit inspired by the love of his country.”4 Stengers concludes with the paradox that if Leopold’s “voracity” was economic imperialism in its purest form, it is impossible to see it as a result of the capitalist