Böcker av Steven Press

The history of mass-market diamonds goes back to German imperialism in Southwest Africa. Corporate power and state violence combined in the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples, whose mineral-rich land supplied budding consumer demand in the United States. Steven Press makes clear that mass luxury has always come at a huge price.

In the 1880s Europeans grabbed vast swaths of the African continent, using documents, not guns, as their weapon of choice. Steven Press follows a paper trail of questionable contracts to discover the confidence men who exploited a loophole in international law to assert sovereignty over lands, and whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa.