"Originally published, in slightly different form, in 2009 by Verso Books, Great Britain"--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [289]-302) and index.

"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 thirty thousand Indians had died to produce four thousand tons of rubber. When Casement's seven-hundred-page report of the Putumayo violence was published in London in 1912, it set off reverberations throughout the world. People were appalled that murderous acts were being carried out in the name of profit, all under the cloak of British respectability and fairness. The Peruvian Amazon Company was forced into liquidation, and its board of directors, including an aristocrat with ties to the royal family, was publicly shamed." -- dust jacket.