Judging Rodney in his own century

Rodney was a complicated product of his time whose calculations and temper sometimes led him badly astray. The approach to historical judgment here assesses Rodney against eighteenth-century norms, including the limits his own contemporaries recognized. The Belgian Congo provides the comparison: other imperial powers criticized the Belgian king's regime even while accepting empire as an institution. This approach still leaves Rodney responsible for conduct that people in his own century would have condemned. A personal view of heroism values repeated effort and public service despite human faults.