Madagascar: Slavery and early state formation (1642-1750)

Updated November 2005

From 1642 onwards, the French established a number of trading posts on the east coast such as Fort-Dauphin at Taolagnaro in the south and Sainte Marie Island further north. The French post at Fort-Dauphin flourished initially, for the colonists formed close ties with the Antanosy who dominated the area. Relations later deteriorated and in 1674 the settlement was destroyed and the bulk of its population exterminated (Columbia Encyclopedia 2005, US State Department 2005, Library of Congress 1994a). Vink (2003) estimates that 31 076 of 44 394 slaves (70%) imported by the French to Mauritius and Réunion between 1670 and 1769 originated in Madagascar. Omanis, Portuguese and the British were similarly engaged in slave trafficking (McDonald 2005).

The destruction of Fort-Dauphin spelled the end of formal, large-scale French activity around the island until the nineteenth century; this left a vacuum of sea-power around its coasts. No single European or Indian Ocean power was willing or able to control the coasts of Madagascar and it became the base of pirate and small scale slave trading activities in the 17th to the first quarter of the 19th centuries (US State Department 2005). The lack of centralized control and the abundance of food resources, as well as its strategic location, made Madagascar an ideal location for these adventurers to operate from. Slavery and the slave trade were not new to the Madagascan society and seem to have predated state formation in the early 1600s. Not only had the Muslim trading posts engaged in small scale export for centuries, but Madagascan society was itself highly stratified with a substantial slave cast forming the lowest rungs of the socio-political structure (McDonald 2005, Library of Congress 1994a).

The slave trade was facilitated by the process of state formation that the island underwent from the early 1600s onwards. The consolidation of the small independent communities of coast and highlands into small states in the 17th century, which then progressively coalesced into ever larger states through conquest, seems to have been a new phenomenon and is attributed to the arrival of people from the African mainland, who originated from the gold mining states of Zimbabwe, called the Maroseraña (Bortolot Undated). The invaders quickly assimilated the culture of their subjects and expanded rapidly forming small dynastic states throughout the island. The increasing centralisation enabled greater specialisation and trade and the diffusion of common cultural and ideological forms and values throughout the island, encouraged by the practices of local rulers. The seats of the royal courts became centres of trade networks and industrial production as well as markets for foreigners to buy slaves (Bortolot Undated, Library of Congress 1994a).

The French thus found a number of small polities, both on the coast and in the interior. The Bétsiléo and the Merina in the highlands were both divided into a number of small polities. The four Bétsiléo states were united by Andriamanalimbetany the ruler of Isandra in the late 1700s, but their state was overthrown in 1830 by a united and expanding Merina kingdom in 1830 (Library of Congress 1994f). The Sakalwa, under the leadership of Andriandahifotsi, established hegemony over the northern and western areas of the island in the late 17th century, but the polity disintegrated in the following century (Columbia Encyclopedia 2005, Bortolot Undated). The Mahafaly, migrating from Anosy in the sixteenth century, founded a number of warring kingdoms which controlled much of the south and which were only extinguished with the expansion of the Merina (Bouwer & Erasmus 2000).

Menabé, with its capital initially at Toliara, dominated the infertile grasslands of the west and in the northwest Boina established control over the trading port of Mahajanga. The Menabé and Boina kingdoms were successors to the Sakalwa and widely disseminated the Sakalwa concept of sacred kingship (Columbia Encyclopedia 2005, Bortolot Undated, Library of Congress 1994a). Antemoro, by contrast, was a large trading city in the southeast, founded at the turn of the first millennium CE by Arabs. It followed an idiosyncratic syncretistic form of Islam and was Madagascar's first literate society; it was then (as it is today) the centre of a high quality paper manufacturing industry (Griffin 2005).

From the 1670s English and American colonial vessels, financed primarily by New York merchants and with the tacit approval of the colonial governors, were active. They plundered Arab and European vessels alike and exported slaves to St Helena, the West Indies and the British colonies in New England and New York (McDonald 2005). The alliances that these privateers formed with local princes had significance for the political development of the coastal areas of the island; the pirates became involved in local wars to obtain slaves, while their allies used their superior military technology to defeat their enemies and expand their polities (McDonald 2005).

The pirates married with the local women and a small European-Madagascan creole group emerged which was instrumental in founding the Betsimisaraka confederation in 1712 under the leadership of Ratsimilaho, the son of a pirate and a Malagasy princess, which dominated the eastern coast until 1750 (McDonald 2005). Local principalities were no less active at this time, and warfare between them produced a continual flow of slaves in the 1600s and 1700s. The militant Sultanate of Maselagache was one of several expansionist Muslim states on the coast, while the consolidation of polities of the highlands, the Merina and the Bétsiléo, constituted another source of slaves (Vink 2003).

References

BORTOLOT, AI UNDATED "Kingdoms of Madagascar: Maroserana and Merina" The Metropolitan Museum of Art [www] http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/madg_1/hd_madg_1.htm [opens new window] (accessed 23 Oct 2007).

BOUWER, L & ERASMUS, B 2000 "The Mahafale of Madagascar", CESA, [www] http://cesa.imb.org/peoplegroups/mahafale.htm [opens new window] (accessed 23 Oct 2007).

COLUMBIA ENCYCLOPEDIA 2005 "Madagascar", Sixth edition, [www] http://www.bartleby.com/65/ma/Madagasc.html [opens new window] (accessed 23 Oct 2007).

GRIFFIN, W 2005 "Seafaring Swahili and the Antemoro of Madagascar" [www] http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~arch200/Griffin2-22lecture.htm [opens new window] (accessed 23 Oct 2007).

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 1994a "Precolonial Era, Prior to 1894" IN Country Study: Madagascar [www] http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+mg0013) [opens new window] (accessed 23 Oct 2007).

MCDONALD, KP 2005 "A Man of Courage and Activity': Thomas Tew and Pirate Settlements of the Indo-Atlantic Trade World, 1645-1730", University of California World History Workshop [www] http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=ucwhw [PDF document, opens new window] (accessed 23 Oct 2007).

US STATE DEPARTMENT 2005 "Background Note: Madagascar" [www] http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/5460.htm [opens new window] (accessed 23 Oct 2007).

VINK, M 2003 "The World's Oldest Trade: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century," Journal of World History June [www] http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jwh/14.2/vink.html [opens new window] (accessed 23 Oct 2007).