Hochschild introduces his study of the Congo at the turn of the twentieth century with a focus on what he calls “a young man’s flash of moral recognition” (1). The young man in question is “the sober, respectable businessman,” Edmund Dene Morel, who is a “trusted employee of a Liverpool shipping line” (1). This is the man at the center of Hochschild’s story—the man who comes “face to face with evil” when he realizes that the “trade” happening in the Congo is not “trade” at all: the goods arriving in Europe from the Congo have been acquired through slave labor. This realization motivates Morel to begin what Hochschild calls the “first great international human rights movement of the twentieth century” (2).

The Introduction acknowledges Hochschild’s own initial ignorance of Congolese history, while asking how the genocide that occurred there under King Leopold’s rule could have been erased from our collective memory. He recounts a visit to the Congo in 1961, during which he listens to a CIA operative’s smug account of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected prime minister of the newly-formed nation of Congo. However, he notes, it is not until several decades later, sparked by a footnote in a book about Mark Twain’s involvement in the “worldwide movement against slave labor in the Congo” (3), that Hochschild confronts his own ignorance.