The Devil and Mr. Casement
One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South America's Heart of Darkness
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
THE STORY OF AN IMPERIAL TRAGEDY THAT SENT SHOCKWAVES AROUND THE WORLD
In September 1910, the activist Roger Casement arrived in the Amazon jungle on a mission for the British government: to investigate reports of widespread human-rights abuses in the forests along the Putumayo River. Accusations against the Peruvian rubber baron Julio César Arana had been making their way back to London, and the rumors were on everybody's lips: Arana was enslaving, torturing, and murdering the local Indians. Arana's Peruvian Amazon Company, with its headquarters in London's financial heart, was responsible.
Casement was outraged by what he uncovered: nearly 30,000 Indians had died to produce 4,000 tons of rubber. When Casement's 700-page report of the violence was published in London in 1912, it set off reverberations throughout the world. People were appalled that murderous acts were being carried out under the cloak of British respectability. The Peruvian Amazon Company was forced into liquidation, and its board of directors was publicly shamed.
From the Amazonian rain forests to the streets of London and Washington, D.C., Jordan Goodman recounts a tragedy whose exposure in 1912 drew back the curtain on exploitation and the wholesale abuse of human rights. Drawing on a wealth of original research, The Devil and Mr. Casement is a haunting story of modern capitalism with enormous contemporary political resonance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Goodman (The Rattlesnake), an honorary research associate at London's Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, chronicles the dangerous 1910s quest of British activist Roger Casement to publicize the human rights abuses against local Indians by brutal Peruvian rubber baron Julio C sar Arana's Peruvian Amazon Company. British envoy Casement's 700-plus page report on the mass violence and deaths of 30,000 natives to produce an international rubber surplus was published by the House of Commons, and Arana's empire was eventually dismantled, but not before economic and political pressures were used to threaten Casement and Britain's global colonial policy as well. The book is most fascinating when detailing Arana's bold skirmishes with Casement in the media and in the courts. Well researched and exquisitely told, Goodman's account of one brave man bringing down a cruel business empire is worthy of attention. 8 pages of b&w illus.
