David Nicoll was an anarchist militant, active in Sheffield and London, who was never afraid to give the powerful the sharp side of his tongue. In Stanley’s Exploits, or, Civilising Africa, he berates Henry Morton Stanley and his cheerleaders in the British press who thought that massacring Africans in the cause of ‘civilising’ them was a price worth paying. Nicoll’s delivers a sharp anti-colonialist diatribe.

‘We never need an excuse to reprint work by David Nicoll, the anarchist militant who did time for exposing the framing of the Walsall Anarchists and agitated tirelessly as an editor, speaker and writer. But despite the fact that it’s well written, can any pamphlet over 100 years old say anything of relevance now? Nicoll uses all those nineteenth century words – “savages,” “civilisation,” “explorers”; but read a page and you’ll see he knows who is worthy of contempt, who the enemy is…’