page_title: E. D. Morel
section_title: Discoveries at Elder Dempster
hierarchical_section_title: E. D. Morel / Congo activism / Discoveries at Elder Dempster
caption_attribution_description: English: Red Rubber frontipage E. D. Morel, 1906
context_page_description: Edmund Dene Morel was a French-born British journalist, author, pacifist, and politician.
  As a young official at the shipping company Elder Dempster, Morel observed a fortune in rubber returning from the Congo while only guns and manacles were being sent in return. He correctly deduced that these resources were being extracted from the population by force and began to campaign to expose the abuses. In collaboration with Roger Casement, Morel led a campaign against slavery in the Congo Free State, founding the Congo Reform Association and running the West African Mail. With the help of celebrities such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain, the movement successfully pressured the Belgian King Leopold II to sell the Congo Free State to the Belgian government, ending some of the human rights abuses perpetrated under his rule.
  Morel played a significant role in the British pacifist movement during the First World War, participating in the foundation of and becoming secretary of the Union of Democratic Control, at which point he broke with the Liberal Party. In 1917, he was jailed for six months for his antiwar activism, which had a permanent effect on his health.
context_section_description: In 1891, Morel obtained a clerkship with Elder Dempster, a Liverpool shipping firm.  To increase his income and support his family, from 1893 Morel began writing articles against French protectionism, which was damaging Elder Dempster's business. He came to be critical of the Foreign Office for not supporting the rights of Africans under colonial rule. His vision of Africa was influenced by the books of Mary Kingsley, an English traveller and writer, which showed sympathy for African peoples and a respect for different cultures that was very rare amongst Europeans at the time. Groups such as the Aborigines' Protection Society had already begun a campaign against alleged atrocities in Congo.
  Elder Dempster had a shipping contract with the Congo Free State for the connection between Antwerp and Boma. Due to his knowledge of French, Morel was often sent to Belgium, where he was able to view the internal accounts of the Congo Free State held by Elder Dempster. The knowledge that the ships leaving Belgium for the Congo carried only guns, chains, ordnance and explosives, but no commercial goods, while ships arriving from the colony came back full of valuable products such as raw rubber and ivory, led him to the conclusion that Belgian King Leopold II's policy was exploitative and a type of slavery. According to author Adam Hochschild, Morel's conclusions were correct—the value of the goods coming from the Congo Free State was five times that of the goods coming from Europe, and the difference was being extracted from the Congolese population through force and mass atrocities.
  Morel discussed the discrepancies with the head of the Elder Dempster line, who responded coldly and dismissively. The company soon offered Morel an overseas promotion and then a sinecure consultancy in return for a guarantee of his silence. Morel refused both offers, and left the company in 1901 to become a full-time journalist.
caption: Red Rubber: "The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Flourishing on the Congo in the Year of Grace, 1906"
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