The man who murdered Congo

Indeed, this was the image that Leverhulme cultivated during his lifetime. Widely seen as a liberal philanthropist, he espoused a variety of progressive causes and created model worker settlements such as Port Sunlight near Liverpool.

When the search for palm oil in the Congo began, he stressed his compassionate credentials and even went as far as to court the sympathies of socialists in Belgium, combining the usual colonialist rubbish about bringing the benefits of civilisation, Christianity and the dignity of labour with more down-to-earth promises to pay good wages and combat tropical disease.

The reality of his involvement in the Congo, however, turned out to be completely different and, in the drive to make a quick buck, nothing was allowed to stand in his way.

Collaborating with that well-known democrat King Leopold of Belgium, he unleashed a wave of theft, resettlement, forced labour and sheer violence on an almost unimaginable scale.

The result was that Western business concerns, of which Leverhulme's was one of the largest, managed to halve the population of Congo within just a couple of decades, killing millions in a way that has inevitably invoked comparison with the nazi Holocaust.

Having been a diplomat in the Belgian Congo and having spent some 20 years researching the history of forced labour in the region, the late Jules Marchal knew what he was talking about and Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts is an exhaustively detailed account that should make Unilever hang its head in shame.

Not that this experience was unique, though. As Adam Hochschild notes in his superb introduction to the book, similar acts of butchery took place in, among others, German controlled Cameroon and Portuguese Angola.

The fact that over four million Congolese have met their deaths since 1997 as a result of local corrupt elites working hand in hand with resource-greedy multinationals also shows that the ghosts of Leverhulme have yet to be laid to rest.

STEVE ANDREW