Edmund Dene Morel was the son of a minor French civil servant and an English mother. His father died young and left no pension for his mother so the young Morel began work as a clerk in Paris at age 15. He later went to work for the Elder Dempster steamship company in Liverpool where his appetite for hard work, attention to detail and bilingualism led to his being apppointed to liaise with the officials of the
L'Etat Indépendant du Congo, for whom Elder Dempster held the monopoly contract on imports and exports from the Belgian colony in the Congo. In this capacity he noticed that thousands of rifles and huge quantities of cartridges were being sent to the Congo (q.v.), but relatively few trade goods, and certainly not enough to account for the quantities of rubber and ivory obtained in…
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Citation: Clark, Robert. "E. D. Morel". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 January 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3194, accessed 22 November 2024.]
