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I thought Phillipp Blom's chapter in _The Vertigo Years_ on the Belgian Congo, Leopold II, Dunlop Tires, Roger Casement, and the murder/ mutilation of generations of Congolese was (for me) a brutal but unforgettably graphic introduction to the barbarism of European mercantile colonies in Africa. The chapter's probably not serious or scholarly enough for your survey, but nothing so forcefully impressed me with the atrocities and hypocrisies endemic to European colonialism and the sanctimonious re-framing of European 'work' in Africa as a 'civilizing' mission.

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