{"id":575,"date":"2004-02-26T01:26:39","date_gmt":"2004-02-26T05:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/metasj\/2004\/02\/26\/currency-of-severed-members\/"},"modified":"2004-02-26T01:26:39","modified_gmt":"2004-02-26T05:26:39","slug":"currency-of-severed-members","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2004\/02\/26\/currency-of-severed-members\/","title":{"rendered":"Currency of Severed Members"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a388'><\/a><\/p>\n<p><P>For those of you forever looking for new anecdotal tokens of liquidity and value:<\/P><br \/>\n<BLOCKQUOTE><br \/>\n<P>The baskets of <STRONG>severed hands<\/STRONG>, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. &#8230; The collection of hands became an end in itself. <EM>Force Publique<\/EM> soldiers brought them to the stations <STRONG>in place of<\/STRONG> rubber; they even went out to <STRONG>harvest<\/STRONG> them instead of rubber &#8230;&#8230; They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace &#8230; the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the <EM>Force Publique<\/EM> soldiers were paid their <STRONG>bonuses<\/STRONG> on the <STRONG>basis<\/STRONG> of how many hands they collected. <\/P><br \/>\n<P>-from Peter Forbath&#8217;s <A href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Congo_Free_State\">history of the Congo<\/A>&nbsp;(ref&#8217;ed in WP)<\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For those of you forever looking for new anecdotal tokens of liquidity and value: The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. &#8230; The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-indescribable"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-9h","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}