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Andrew Balfour (Author photograph) Very good in Very good jacket. [8], 376 pages. Map. Includes Introduction, Acknowledgments, Source Notes, Select Bibliography, and Index. Topics covered include Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company; King Leopold and the Rubber Companies; Sir Percy and the Diamond King; Union Miniere in Katanga; Lonrho in Mozambique; Shell in Nigeria; Ranger Oil in Angola; Rakesh Saxena in Sierra Leone; Talisman in Sudan; Salim Seleh in the Congo; and Conclusion: Perfectly Legal, Perfectly Immoral. Includes a map of Africa, as well as a map of South Africa, a map of Nigeria, and a map of Angola. This is a dramatic and compelling journey into the dark heart of globalization. Madelaine Drohan is an award-winning journalist who has covered business and politics in Canada, Europe and Africa during a twenty-five-year career. She was awarded a Reuters Fellowship at Oxford University in 1998 and the Hyman Solomon Award for Excellence in Public Policy Journalism in 2001. She has worked for Maclean's, the Financial Post, and The Globe and Mail. Her book, Making a Killing: How and why corporations use armed force to do business, won the Ottawa Book Award and was short-listed for the National Business Book of the Year Award in 2004. She is a former director of The North-South Institute, Partnership Africa Canada and Transparency International Canada. She was the first woman to win the Hyman Solomon Award for Excellence in Public Policy Journalism in 2001. This book is a valuable contribution on the subject of corporate responsibility. Few books on the subject are as accessible to a wide range of readers, provide historical perspective on the problem, and give a sense of what efforts are underway to stop the problem and hold corporations accountable. The author provides a road map for corporations, policy makers, and investors struggling to come to terms with their roles in today's increasingly globalized world. A courageous and chilling expose of corporate complicity in the politics, this book is well-written, thoroughly researched, and highly evocative. This book deftly demonstrates how some of the world's major contemporary problems have deep historical roots. What happens when multinational corporations decide that the use of armed force is just business by other means? In Making a Killing, Madelaine Drohan looks at the shocking number of companies that have linked up with mercenaries, warlords, armies and private militias in order to make a profit. In a world where multinationals often rival national governments in size and clout, the implications of such partnerships are ominous. What leads respectable corporations down the path to violence? Drohan answers this question by examining the actions of several companies operating in Africa, such as Ranger Oil West Africa, which used the mercenary group Executive Outcomes to take on rebels in Angola's long-running civil war; and Talisman Energy, whose security was provided by Sudanese army units conducting a scorched-earth policy in the oil fields. Drohan traces the modern roots of corporate armed force, beginning with Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company, which at the turn of the century built its own army. Also included is the stranger-than-fiction tale of ex-MI5 spymaster Sir Percy Sillitoe, who was hired by the De Beers diamond king to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring smuggled diamonds in order to develop the hydrogen bomb. These accounts read like adventure stories in the tradition of Rudyard Kipling and Ian Fleming, but they are essential reading for anyone interested in the effects of unfettered multinational influence. Making a Killing provides a road map for corporations, policy makers and investors struggling to come to terms with their roles in today's increasingly globalized world.