Their poor health was due to being “prisoners of war,” or so the Dutch speculated.104
Despite this period of intense violence, it does seem, judging by later observations, that relations between the Muslim merchant elites in the northwest of the island and the new Sakalava rulers were quickly eased, as reported in the traditions. Portuguese visiting “Maselagache” in 1726 described dealing with the “principal Moors” and, a few years later, meeting a king who spoke Arabic fluently.105 Sakalava involvement in the export trade was also clear in other European observations. One English captain described the northwestern town of Mahajanga as a bustling, cosmopolitan port in 1764. He wrote that the town, built “after the Indian fashion,” contained many stone buildings and mosques. Inhabited by “native” Muslims and others from “Surate, Johana, Mosembeck, and the Commoro islands,” Mahajanga was clearly a prosperous and cosmopolitan port. Within the city, the Sakalava rulers allowed Muslims to practice their religion freely. In return, the Sakalava instituted a series of trading controls. The king appointed a “purser authorized to carry trade on in the king’s name, in conjunction with another purser that comes down from the king.”106 Sakalava kings and queens even allowed visiting European merchants to trade with local “Arab” merchants as well as with Sakalava representatives and appeared to be increasingly tapped into these networks crossing the southwestern Indian Ocean region.107 A Sakalava queen married an East African (or Comorian) man around the middle of the eighteenth century, according to English and Dutch reports.108 Sakalava kings and queens also incorporated Islamic beliefs and rituals into their practice of divine kingship and some converted to Islam by the early nineteenth century.109
Instead of destroying trade networks along the northwestern coast, Sakalava rulers reestablished them, under their control, and continued to expand the export trade by extending their power, directly and indirectly, even further into the island. From the northwest coast, the Sakalava rulers gained significant influence over the north of the island during the eighteenth century, but we have few details about how this occurred, as Europeans largely avoided the rocky northern coast of Madagascar prior to the mid-eighteenth century. For example, a 1665 Dutch map displays, with some accuracy, ports around the coast of Madagascar, except in the north. The mapmaker labeled this region “pays incogneu,” an unknown land.110 By the end of the eighteenth century, following several European visits, it became clear that the Sakalava rulers indirectly controlled much of this region as well.111 As the French observed in 1742, several coastal rulers throughout the northern region had familial ties to the Sakalava king at Boina to whom they owed tribute.112
As other Europeans began to frequent major ports dotting the northern coastline, including Nosy Be, Diego Suarez (Antsiranana), and Vohémar, they also noticed that the rulers in these locations all claimed to be blood relatives of the Sakalava ruler of Boina.113 In the 1770s, the French sent several expeditions to explore the north of the island. One representative, Nicolas Mayeur, discovered that a Sakalava leader ruled over a northern province stretching from the west coast to Vohémar in the east. The king, named Lamboine (L’Amboine, Lamboeny), lived in the extreme north of the island in Ankara and oversaw some twenty local leaders controlling smaller provinces. These monarchs ruled over smaller villages located along rivers, which both enabled the easy transportation of trade items to the coast and provided water for growing crops.114 Local leaders sent Lamboine annual tributary payments in rice, cattle, and slaves, which were later sent to Boina. A benevolent ruler, Lamboine exempted the communities from the tributary payments during times of war and privation.115
This picture of tolerance was not without violence. In 1774, the French observed that Lamboine sent five hundred armed men to attack various villages throughout the north. His army raided and stole cattle from villages not already under his control. As a result of their growing military and commercial power, the influence of the Sakalava was expanding all the way to northeastern Madagascar. By 1780, the French discovered that the Sakalava king also had an alliance with a king named “Raminti” ruling over the port of Vohémar on the northeast coast.116 When the French tried to negotiate for cheaper cattle prices from the people of the north and bypass the Sakalava monopoly at Boina, they discovered the extent of Sakalava control over the commerce of northern Madagascar. The Sakalava kings and queens forbade the people in the north to sell cattle directly to French merchants.117
THE LIMITS OF SAKALAVA POWER
By the close of the eighteenth century, the Sakalava king in Boina was known to be a “despotic” king who treated “all of his subjects” as slaves, just as his ancestors had “since time immemorial.”118 Despite this description, it is far from clear that Sakalava queens and kings exercised any sort of absolute domination over communities in western Madagascar. Indeed, the continued reliance on various other elites, translators, and merchants to complete trading agreements with Europeans suggests otherwise. Rather than exercising direct rule, the Sakalava leaders appear to have controlled portions of Madagascar by forming tributary relationships with other communities and marrying into the families of their neighbors. Powerful military, religious, and political leaders thus became kin and part of the Sakalava family.
Karen Middleton has described a similar pattern of political rule among the Karembola in south-central Madagascar. She has argued that “power is concentrated at the center; at the outer margins the ruler’s power fades imperceptibly away. Beyond a core zone the boundaries of a kingdom are unstable and ill defined.”119 Her description has been echoed by Maurice Bloch, who explained that political control in Madagascar came from “force and cattle” as well as “ritual and hasina [the power of the sacred].”120 Such pictures of political power suggest that the incentives for communities to supply Sakalava merchant kings with cattle, rice, and slaves may have been produced both by the monarchs’ purchasing power as well as their ability to coerce, frequently with violence, the exports of these commodities.121 Along with these more material means to power, Sakalava rulers emphasized their links to a divine past, demonstrated through royal worship and commemoration and remembered through oral traditions. This ritual power was clearly expressed to European visitors such as Dean and Drury, who observed powerful men communicating their obedience to the king and worshiping at the burial grounds of prominent ancestors.
The limits of this model of political leadership, based as it was around violence, ritual, and access to cattle, may explain the frequent conflicts that Europeans encountered during the eighteenth century. Many of these conflicts were struggles over royal succession, never simple in a world of complex familial ties and blood-brotherhood.122 Although the tributary model suggests more diffuse power relations than suspected by European visitors to the island who saw the Sakalava king as an absolutist despot, European records confirm that obvious hierarchical relations existed, not only between the rulers and the ruled, but also between various leaders. The adoption of the title “prince” by a leader who could sell cattle to the Europeans and that of “king” by his superior, who could supply not only cattle but also rice and slaves, does not appear accidental. Instead, it suggests that the islanders were attempting to make their political standing clear to visitors by using foreign terms of leadership to label those who could sell provisions and slaves. These terms, however, were adopted following the expansion of the Sakalava to control coastal trading enclaves, revealing that global trade had shaped, but did not trigger, political centralization in western Madagascar.
Did Sakalava rulers thus create an empire? It was not an empire in the European model, or even as successful as the nineteenth-century Merina kingdom of Madagascar, in terms of exacting labor and resources from its subjects.123 It may make more sense to think of the Sakalava as related rulers who controlled the western ports of the island through a network of alliances and had to maintain their power by controlling the circulation of key imports, at first firearms but eventually silver coins as well.124 Stephen Ellis has suggested that the Sakalava kings of Boina were political innovators on the island, developing “a new form of sovereign power by their recruitment of European military advisers and their domination of the slave
