Arwen P. Mohun. American Imperialist: Cruelty and Consequence in the Scramble for Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. 320 pp. $30. Hardback. ISBN: 9780226828190.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: The subject of this intriguing, gracefully written study is historian Arwen P. Mohun's great-grandfather.American Imperialist reminds us that in the slice of history it covers-the Scramble for Africa at its voracious peak-the actors included not just Africans and Europeans, but Americans.One was Richard Dorsey Mohun, born in 1864 to a middle-class family in Washington DC.To help support his widowed mother, he went to work as a civilian clerk for the Navy Department, serving first in Washington and then as an assistant paymaster on board an aging wooden-hulled vessel in the Mediterranean.An ambitious résumé-inflator, he later portrayed the latter job as being an officer in the Marines.Then came work as an auditor for the abortive effort to build a canal across Nicaragua, with various side hustles to supplement his low pay.When the canal project collapsed, family connections won him a position in 1892 as US "commercial agent" to the new private colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, l'État Independant du Congo, or the Congo Free State.At times hundreds of miles away from the nearest telegraph station and always thousands from the nearest critical journalist, Mohun tasted the immense power available to a well-armed white man at this imperial moment.After traveling more than 1,000 miles up the Congo River by steamboat he accompanied a Belgian military commander on a campaign against the Arab traders who were Leopold's rivals.The short-handed officer put the American-whom he believed to be a former Marine-in command of two mobile cannons and their 70-man crew.Mohun loved combat, had deserters shot, ordered whippings for disobedient porters, and sold an article to the Century Illustrated Magazine.The diaspora of imperial adventurers was worldwide, for in the Congo rainforest he ran into an American friend from Nicaragua days, now managing rubbergathering stations.Mohun flew both the American and Congo Free State flags from his river launch, and came back home with photographs, artifacts for the Smithsonian Institution, a leopard cub, and a medal from King Leopold.Some State Department officials disapproved of their commercial agent shelling African villages, but that didn't prevent Mohun's next appointment as US consul to the British protectorate of Zanzibar.The records of his time there allow the reader a glance into a different part of the Scramble, where Britain, less heavy-handed than Leopold, ruled indirectly through the local sultan, controlling a crucial trading hub while competing for influence with Germany, which had a colony on the nearby mainland.
Source: African Studies Review
DOI: 10.1017/asr.2024.112
Author: Adam Hochschild
Institution: University of California, Berkeley
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4402884765