Book Review: Casement by Angus Mitchell, Haus Publishing, 2026

The publication of this book is a timely antidote to the distorted image of Casement that has been presented in recent books, which portray him as a fragile person who was desperate to latch onto any cause to escape his mental frailties.

An example of the approach is to deduce that, because his parents died when he was very young, Casement must have been psychologically damaged in some way.  But Mitchell in his book suggests the opposite.  The circumstances of his childhood made him strong and self-reliant with an ability to adapt to diverse environments.  All the evidence supports the latter view.

His professional career began as a clerk with the Elder Dempster shipping company.  From there at the age of nineteen he became a purser in the SS Bonny.  For the next decade he worked successfully for several charitable, humanitarian and commercial organisations. A Belgian company involved in construction and logistics described him as an “agent exceptionnel”.

In 1892 the inevitable happened:  he was headhunted by the British Foreign Office. He worked in several capacities including Intelligence gathering.  His knowledge of logistics made him particularly valuable to the British for assessing the movements of rival powers in Africa, particularly Germany.

Casement was a valued member of the Imperial elite.  But, unlike most of its members, he was not educated at Eton or Harrow, never mind Oxford or Cambridge.  He had left school at 15.  His elevation was purely based on his ability.

During the Boer war he devised a plan to sabotage the main railway bridge between Transvaal and Delagoa Bay.  The military assault would involve 530 elite troops and was approved by Lords Kitchener, Roberts and Milner—the Triumvirate directing the entire war effort (p60).  The plan was abandoned because of a change in the military situation, but the anecdote shows the high level on which Casement was operating.

In the last decade of his time in the Foreign Office he became renowned throughout the world for his investigations into slavery in the Congo and the Putumayo region of South America.  The terms of reference for these investigations were quite restrictive.  The primary objective was to protect the interests of British subjects.  However, Casement’s main concern was to defend the interests of the native population who were subject to the most brutal exploitation.

While Casement achieved international recognition as a great humanitarian, his investigations did not advance his career.  His humanitarianism was cutting across British interests. The Congo was controlled by King Leopold II as a private enterprise.  Britain’s support for Leopold was preferable to a German presence in that part of Africa.  In South America the slavery was financed by a British company.

Mitchell gives a very interesting account of the geopolitical situation in South America at that time.  Britain was a long-standing ally of Portugal with Treaties between the two countries going back to the Middle Ages.  This alliance was a counterweight to Spanish and French Imperial interests in South America.  The British Navy protected Portuguese shipping and in exchange Britain was given access to raw materials in Brazil and other colonies.  Brazil was a commercial dependency of Britain.

Casement gathered the evidence for his Reports on the Congo and the Putumayo in a hostile environment.  He did not have the protection of the law and was very conscious of the need to protect his sources, whose lives were in danger.

The Casement that emerges from this book and others by Mitchell is of a hardheaded and practical person.  His overriding concern was protecting the indigenous populations of the Congo and the Putumayo.

Books such as Brian Inglis’s 1973 biography are quite comfortable with the idea of Casement as a great humanitarian or a“one man Amnesty International”.  They are less happy with his embrace of Irish nationalism.  Inglis considers this as a kind of psychological aberration.  But Mitchell shows that Casement’s nationalism was entirely consistent with his sympathy for indigenous peoples.  The atrocities were not just the actions of bad men, but part of a system of Imperial exploitation.

As an Irishman Casement identified with the victims of Imperialism in Africa, South America and India.  It was precisely because he placed the struggle for Irish independence in its international context that he was so dangerous to the British.

He applied his organisational skills to the successful importation of arms for the Irish volunteers.  His geo-political understanding enabled him to formulate a strategy which amounted to the refusal of Irish people to fight Britain’s Imperial Wars.  This approach was reflected in the reference to our gallant allies in the 1916 Proclamation:  and it remains ingrained in Irish Political consciousness.

There is a very interesting account of Casement’s time in Germany.  He was welcomed by key members of the German State, such as Chancellor Theobald Von Bethmann Hollweg and the Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow.  He also collaborated with the head of German Naval Intelligence to spread disinformation with the help of his faithful servant, Adler Christensen.

Towards the end of the book, Mitchell discusses the Black Diaries; drawing on the extensive work of Paul Hyde.  There can hardly be a reader of the Irish Political Review who doubts that the Black Diaries are forgeries, but it is interesting to note that this is not a view that is widely shared among academics.  Mitchell suggests a reason for this blind spot—

“Casement has become publicly ‘unknowable’—not because the evidence for forgery of the Black Diaries is lacking, but because acknowledging that evidence requires challenging the infallibility of the archive’s authority, and with it, the foundations of contemporary historical practice”.

The inability of historians to acknowledge that the tools of their trade might be faulty has led to the writing of “consensus history” which, according to Mitchell—

“… transforms historians from investigators into gatekeepers of approved memory, ensuring that figures like Casement remain beyond the boundaries of acceptable history and frozen inside interpretations that serve present political needs rather than historical accuracy”.

This book successfully disrupts the consensus history by making the real Casement “knowable”.  It deserves a wide readership. 

John Martin