Land of Tears

The Exploration and Exploitation of Equatorial Africa

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By Robert Harms

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$19.99

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$25.99 CAD

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  1. ebook $19.99 $25.99 CAD
  2. Hardcover $35.00 $44.00 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around December 3, 2019. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

A prizewinning historian’s epic account of the scramble to control equatorial Africa

In just three decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the heart of Africa was utterly transformed. Virtually closed to outsiders for centuries, by the early 1900s the rainforest of the Congo River basin was one of the most brutally exploited places on earth. In Land of Tears, historian Robert Harms reconstructs the chaotic process by which this happened. Beginning in the 1870s, traders, explorers, and empire builders from Arabia, Europe, and America moved rapidly into the region, where they pioneered a deadly trade in ivory and rubber for Western markets and in enslaved labor for the Indian Ocean rim. Imperial conquest followed close behind.

Ranging from remote African villages to European diplomatic meetings to Connecticut piano-key factories, Land of Tears reveals how equatorial Africa became fully, fatefully, and tragically enmeshed within our global world.

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On Sale
Dec 3, 2019
Page Count
544 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9781541699663

Robert Harms

About the Author

Robert Harms is Henry J. Heinz Professor of History and African Studies at Yale University. He is the author of several books on African history, including The Diligent, winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Frederick Douglass Prize, and the J. Russell Major Prize. He lives in Guilford, Connecticut.

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