Edmund Dene Morel (born Georges Edmond Pierre Achille Morel Deville; 10 July 1873 – 12 November 1924) was a French-born British journalist, author, pacifist and politician.
As a young official at the shipping company Elder Dempster, Morel observed a fortune being made in the import of Congo rubber and the shipping out of guns and manacles. He correctly deduced that the rubber and other resources were being extracted from the Congolese by force and began to campaign to expose the abuses. In collaboration with Roger Casement, Morel led a campaign against slavery in the Congo Free State, founded the Congo Reform Association and published the West African Mail. With the help of celebrities such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain, the movement successfully pressured the Belgian King Leopold II to sell the Congo Free State to the Belgian government, ending some of the human rights abuses perpetrated under his rule.
Morel played a significant role in the British pacifist movement during the First World War, participating in the foundation of and becoming secretary of the Union of Democratic Control, at which point he broke with the Liberal Party. In 1917 he was jailed for six months for his antiwar activism, which had a permanent effect on his health. After the war, he edited the journal Foreign Affairs, through which he sharply criticised what he considered French aggression and mistreatment of the defeated Central Powers. As part of his campaign against the French, he became the most important English proponent of the Black Shame campaign, which accused black French troops of outrages against the population of the occupied Rhineland.
Morel was elected to Parliament in 1922 as a Labour candidate, defeating the incumbent Winston Churchill for his seat, and was re-elected in 1924, dying in office. Morel collaborated closely with future Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and was considered for the post of Foreign Secretary, though he ultimately acted only as an unofficial adviser to MacDonald's government.
Background Morel was born in the Avenue d'Eylau, Paris. His father, Edmond Pierre Marie Morel de Ville, was a French civil servant; his mother, Eliza Emmeline de Horne, was from an English Quaker family and landed gentry - the De Hornes of Stanway Hall. Edmond died when his son was four years old, leaving no pension,Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998. p. 177. and Emmeline subsequently fell out with her late husband's family. As a consequence, Emmeline changed her name to Deville and raised her son on her own. To remove her son from the family's influence, she worked as a teacher so that she could send him to boarding school at both Madras House school in Eastbourne and later at Bedford Modern School.
When Emmeline Deville fell ill in 1888, the money for school fees was no longer available and Edmund was forced to return to Paris to work as a bank clerk.Hochschild, p. 177. He was able to move his mother back to England in 1891. Five years later, he successfully applied for naturalisation as a British subject and anglicised his name. He married Mary Richardson that same year; they had five children. His daughter Stella married the Polish political activist Joseph Retinger in 1926. They had two daughters.
Congo activism
Discoveries at Elder Dempster
In 1891, Morel obtained a clerkship with Elder Dempster, a Liverpool shipping firm.Dorward, David. "Morel, E.D." In Colonialism: An International, Social, Cultural, and Political Encyclopedia, Volume 1. Eds. Melvin Eugene Page and Penny M. Sonnenburg. ABC-CLIO, 2003. p. 392. To increase his income and support his family, from 1893 Morel began writing articles against French protectionism, which was damaging Elder Dempster's business. He came to be critical of the Foreign Office for not supporting the rights of Africans under colonial rule. His vision of Africa was influenced by the books of Mary Kingsley, an English traveller and writer, which showed sympathy for African peoples and a respect for different cultures that was very rare amongst Europeans at the time.Hochschild, p. 188. Groups such as the Aborigines' Protection Society had already begun a campaign against alleged atrocities in Congo.Hochschild, p. 173.
Elder Dempster had a shipping contract with the Congo Free State for the connection between Antwerp and Boma. Due to his knowledge of French, Morel was often sent to Belgium, where he was able to view the internal accounts of the Congo Free State held by Elder Dempster. The knowledge that the Elder Dempster ships leaving Belgium for the Congo regularly carried guns, chains, ordnance and explosives, and articles which were remote from trade purposes, while ships arriving from the colony came back full of valuable products such as raw rubber and ivory, led him to the conclusion that Belgian King Leopold II's policy was exploitative and a type of slavery.Hochschild, pp. 178-180. According to author Adam Hochschild, Morel's conclusions were correct—the value of the goods coming from the Congo Free State was five times that of the goods coming from Europe, and the difference was being extracted from the Congolese population through force and mass atrocities.Hochschild, p. 180.
Morel discussed the discrepancies with the head of the Elder Dempster line, who responded coldly and dismissively. The company soon offered Morel an overseas promotion and then a sinecure consultancy in return for a guarantee of his silence. Morel refused both offers, and left the company in 1901 to become a full-time journalist.Hochschild, pp. 185-186.
Journalism and Congo Reform Association In 1900, Morel put new life into the campaign against Congo misrule (begun a decade before by the American George Washington Williams) with a series of articles detailing his discoveries about the Congo Free State trade imbalances. His inside information made him a powerful voice against the exploitation, as previous activists had lacked his access to precise figures about the trade.Hochschild, p. 185. In 1903, he founded his own magazine, the West African Mail, with the collaboration of John Holt, a businessman and friend of Mary Kingsley, who feared that the system of the Congo Free State would be applied upon the rest of the West African colonies. The Mail was an "illustrated weekly journal founded to meet the rapidly growing interest in west and central African questions".Hochschild 1998, p. 186 The paper also received initial financial backing from Sir Alfred Lewis Jones, Morel's former employer at Elder Dempster, apparently in a final attempt to moderate Morel's criticism of the company, but Jones soon discontinued his support.Hochschild, p. 213. Morel published several pamphlets and his first book, Affairs of West Africa, a collection of his essays.Olusanya, G.O. "Reviewed Work: AFFAIRS OF WEST AFRICA by E. D. Morel". Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria. Vol. 4, No. 4, June 1969. pp. 639-641.
In 1903, under pressure from Morel's campaign, the British House of Commons passed a resolution protesting human rights abuses in the Congo.Hochschild, pp. 194-95. Subsequently, the British consul in the Congo, Roger Casement, was sent up country by the Foreign Office for an investigation.Hochschild, p. 195. Casement was outraged by the evidence of atrocities that he discovered and wrote a blistering report in 1904, discussing its contents with the London press even before its official release.Hochschild, pp. 201-204. Morel was introduced to Casement by their mutual friend Herbert Ward just before the publication of the report and realised that in Casement he had found the ally he had sought.Pavlakis, Dean. British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement, 1896-1913. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.Hochschild, pp. 204-205. Casement convinced Morel to establish an organisation for dealing specifically with the Congo question, the Congo Reform Association; because of the restrictions placed on Casement by his official duties, Morel would be the organisation's head.Hochschild, pp. 206-207. Affiliates of the Congo Reform Association were established as far away as the United States.
The Congo Reform Association had the support of famous writers such as Joseph Conrad (whose Heart of Darkness was inspired by a voyage to the Congo Free State), Anatole France,Hochschild, p. 236. Nobel laureates Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and John Galsworthy,Hochschild, p. 273. Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle,Hochschild, p. 271. civil rights activist Booker T. Washington, and Mark Twain.Hochschild, pp. 241-242. Conan Doyle wrote The Crime of the Congo in 1908, while Twain gave the most famous contribution with the satirical short story King Leopold's Soliloquy. Conrad and Ford Madox Ford also included a devastating parody of Leopold II in their cowritten novel The Inheritors.Hochschild, p. 257.
Morel's best allies, however, may have been the Christian missionaries who furnished him with eyewitness accounts and photographs of the atrocities, such as those given by the Americans William Morrison and William Henry Sheppard,Hochschild, pp. 259-260. and the British John Hobbis Harris and Alice Harris.Hochschild, p. 216. The chocolate millionaire William Cadbury, a Quaker, was one of his main financial backers.Hochschild, pp. 213, 216. The Belgian socialist leader Emile Vandervelde sent him copies of Belgian parliamentary debates and was recruited by Morel to successfully defend the missionaries Sheppard and Morrison pro bono in a libel suit brought by Kasai Rubber Company.Hochschild, pp. 263-264. Morel also had secret connections with some agents within the Congo Free State itself. Even the Church of England and American religious groups backed him.
In 1905 the movement won a victory when a Commission of Enquiry, instituted (under external pressure) by King Léopold II himself, substantially confirmed the accusations made about the colonial administration.Hochschild, p. 251. In the face of mounting public and diplomatic pressure, in 1908 the Congo was annexed to the Belgian government and put under its sovereignty.Hochschild, pp. 257-259. Despite this, Morel refused to declare an end to the campaign until 1913 because he wanted to see actual changes in the situation of the country. The Congo Reform Association ended operations in 1913.Hochschild, pp. 271-273.
World War I activism
Foreign policy During the Agadir Crisis of 1911, Morel was entirely in sympathy with Germany and opposed to what he regarded as bellicosity by the United Kingdom and France, as well as secret diplomacy between the states involved.Rodriguez, J. (2011). Slavery in the Modern World: A History of Political, Social, and Economic Oppression. ABC-CLIO. p. 405. He wrote Morocco in Diplomacy (1912) to express his views on the issue. At this time he was also selected by the Liberal Party as a prospective House of Commons candidate for Birkenhead.
Pacifism and formation of Union of Democratic Control