April 9, 1835 - Leopold II
His reign over the Congo Free State, conducted entirely at a remove from Brussels, amounted to the systematic extraction of labor and resources from millions of people through coercion, mutilation, and killing — operated not as a colony of Belgium but as his personal property. The scale of what he organized in Central Africa, using private mercenary forces and rubber quotas enforced by violence, resulted in a population catastrophe whose full dimensions are still debated by historians. What distinguishes his case is the legal and diplomatic architecture he constructed to make it possible: the Berlin Conference gave international legitimacy to what was, in practice, a privately held regime of forced labor.
From Wikipedia
Leopold II (9 April 1835 – 17 December 1909) was the second king of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909, and the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908.
Born in Brussels as the second but eldest-surviving son of King Leopold I and Queen Louise, Leopold succeeded his father to the Belgian throne in 1865 and reigned for 44 years until his death, the longest reign of a Belgian monarch to date. He died without surviving legitimate sons; the current king of the Belgians, Philippe, descends from his nephew and successor, Albert I. He is popularly referred to as the Builder King in Belgium in reference to the great number of buildings, urban projects and public works he commissioned.
Leopold was the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private colonial project undertaken on his own behalf as a personal union with Belgium. He used Henry Morton Stanley to help him lay claim to the Congo, the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, the colonial nations of Europe authorised his claim and committed the Congo Free State to him. Leopold ran the Congo, which he never personally visited, by using the mercenary Force Publique for his personal gain. He extracted a fortune from the territory, initially by the collection of ivory and, after a rise in the price of rubber in the 1890s, by forced labour from the Indigenous population to harvest and process rubber.
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