Despite opportunities for scholars to trace the shifting relationships between European traders and coastal rulers through these documents, the use of such sources can encourage us to overstate the impact of Europeans upon the island’s history, society, and culture. The provisioning trade presented new opportunities for many in Madagascar, allowing for the creation of new coastal trading enclaves as well as providing new idioms of power and leadership to the islanders. In spite of this fact, the most important (in terms of both quantity and frequency) and longest-running exports from the island were probably via the northwest ports of the island to the Comoros, East Africa, and the northern Indian Ocean. Europeans knew little of these exchanges or how the networks had become intertwined in complex ways with their own by the nineteenth century.
The information found in ship logs is also limited by the nature of European visits to Madagascar. Europeans rarely had time to learn much of island cultural practices or their language during their stays. Most strikingly, European references to locations visited on the shores of the island were frequently confused and it is sometimes hard even to discern which parts of Madagascar they visited and with whom they traded.64 The other major shortcoming of these sources is clear from the outset: the writers had only limited knowledge of the goings-on in the interior of the island. With their stays almost entirely limited to the beaches and direct shoreline, captains and trading officials knew little about (and demonstrated an overall lack of interest in) events occurring in the interior. This coastal focus limits our understanding of the sources of slaves for sale, the origins of rice sold in ports, and the expansion of highland states far into the interior during the eighteenth century. Europeans provide relatively reliable information about prices and items purchased, but their grasp of political dynamics on the island was limited and tinged by their own understandings of states and leadership.
It is also worth noting that the unevenness of the sources, with some of the writers limiting their discussion of trade to a few sentences or pages, prevents reliable numerical analysis, such as about the exact amounts of food available for purchase in any given year or even the precise price given for each slave purchased. Moreover, records are not available for all voyages; the figures displayed in this book are based on the records I was able to consult or uncover, but there were certainly many more stops at Madagascar by ships in search of slaves and food. Not all voyages left a record of their travels. For instance, ship journals are unavailable for almost a hundred of the 211 EIC voyages that are listed as halting in Madagascar in the online catalog of the British Library.65 While we know the itineraries for many of these voyages, most of the daily details have been lost.
Despite the challenges presented by the use of European ship records, these sources provide valuable, if limited, glimpses into the opportunities presented by this rapidly globalizing world to coastal leaders and rulers. When examined in combination with the findings of archeologists and later recorded Malagasy traditions, these sources allow us to reach the conclusion that the provisioning export trade shaped political and economic developments on the island for more than two centuries. The sources also provide a potent reminder that European merchants relied on the assistance of local communities within Madagascar to complete transoceanic voyages that contributed to significant transformations back in Europe.
CHAPTERS
Feeding Globalization recounts the history of this global feasting table by starting with the first European arrivals on the island. The second chapter uses European letters, ship logs, and published accounts to uncover the optimism that visitors felt upon first encountering Madagascar. Perceptions of a verdant and relatively unpopulated island encouraged the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English to repeatedly send merchant vessels. Their experiences also led to efforts to colonize Madagascar, but European desires for unfettered access to the resources of the island were never fulfilled. Local leaders quickly forestalled all attempts to take control by refusing to provide European colonizers with adequate food and support. European optimism during this early period, however, did contribute to the island becoming a provisioning stop for merchant fleets entering the Indian Ocean.
European sources only hint at the massive political transformations occurring on the island throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two expansive military states formed during this period and began to take control of the export trade. Relying upon a variety of sources, including oral traditions, the next two chapters chart the rise of the Sakalava on the west coast and the Betsimisaraka to the east. The leaders of these states used violence to wrest control of coastal exchanges from other groups and to develop supply routes that stretched across the entire island. The less coordinated Betsimisaraka state had a harder time securing supplies of food and slaves for export than the Sakalava leaders who dominated the export trade from the entire west coast of Madagascar throughout the eighteenth century.
Following the rise of these two states, visits by European vessels to Madagascar became more regular and reliable, as described in chapter 5. This increased regularity was facilitated by the development of secure relationships between rulers and the Europeans who frequented the island. These alliances were cemented through elaborate rituals that included feasts and gift exchanges, with these rituals effectively eliminating other coastal people from participating in exchanges. In the explosion of documentation that accompanied their visits, European officers revealed that they were in fear during their stays on the island due to a lack of control over sailors on shore and on ship. Their fears manifested themselves in both a desire for the quick loading of provisions as well as a growing dependence on rulers to help them maintain control over subordinates on the beaches of Madagascar.
Chapter 6 describes how European struggles for dominance within the Indian Ocean during the mid-eighteenth century culminated in the battles of the Seven Years’ War. The outbreak of war led to the French and British forging closer relationships with coastal rulers as their ships halted frequently in the ports of Madagascar for provisions. The French in particular invested a great deal of energy and resources in attempting to colonize the island repeatedly during the second half of the eighteenth century. As a result, by the start of the nineteenth century both the French and British were interested in a more permanent trading presence in Madagascar.
Competition for food and labor increased sharply within the region by the late eighteenth century, as described in chapter 7, and resulted in several important shifts in the use and sale of slave labor from the island. The rising demand from Europeans, particularly the French, for slaves from Madagascar coincided with a marked decline in the availability of enslaved laborers from the shores of the island. Slaves became scarcer and more expensive. The transformation of the slave trade, in terms of prices and availability, only makes sense in the context of the expanding provisioning trade, as coastal rulers were retaining slaves to work in a productive capacity on the island, and selling them, along with food, in return for silver coins. By the close of the century, communities within Madagascar even began to import enslaved laborers from East Africa to augment this work force.
Chapter 8 reveals how coastal populations responded to the heightened demand for laborers by turning beyond the island’s shores to acquire slaves. Between roughly 1790 and 1820, hundreds of islanders left the eastern and western coasts of Madagascar annually in fleets of canoes, paddling toward the nearby Comoro Islands and East Africa. These armed men launched attacks on coastal populations, kidnapping large portions of the Comoro Islands population and forcing East Africans to flee into the interior of the continent. According to Comorians remembering