Portuguese carracks in the bays of Madagascar during the sixteenth century likely did not initially shock the people of the island. Similar to coastal communities in Africa or Asia, many in northern Madagascar already participated in the long-distance trade networks that crossed the ocean.13 A hundred years later, as more foreign sailors and soldiers had spilled onto their shores, the islanders found themselves fueling the oceanic explorations of not just Portuguese sailors, but also Dutch, French, and British. Their growing need for provisions spurred the expansion of food production within Madagascar and unleashed a ripple of changes on the island.
Madagascar has frequently fallen between the cracks in a historiography built upon an area studies framework, being neither a part per se of continental Africa nor completely within the Indian Ocean monsoonal wind patterns that had shaped premodern trade in the ocean.14 The history of communities within Madagascar does not lend itself easily to comparisons with those along the shores of the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian Peninsula, or even nearby East Africa. In these locations, European influence was significantly blunted by a long history of oceanic trade connections. Much of Madagascar, by contrast, had been more removed from long-distance commerce and strong, externally focused political systems were only present in the north of the island before 1600. Yet, in spite of their distance from the African continent, the people of Madagascar have long lived at the crossroads of influences from both Asia and Africa. Movements of traders, slaves, and migrants ensured that the islanders were never completely isolated from other populations living along the shores of the Indian Ocean with whom they shared not only ancestry, but also vocabulary, farming techniques, and religious beliefs. These connections tended to be attenuated by the large distances between the island and major trading hubs throughout the ocean and were found most strongly in northern Madagascar.15
Between 1600 and 1800, rather than being a very minor player in the incipient world system, the island was a part of transoceanic trade networks that tied together various regions of the world. Throughout these centuries, the people of Madagascar enabled global commerce between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and, as such, their story is as much a global one as one restricted to the Indian Ocean.16 Yet Madagascar only remained a central provisioning location for a relatively brief period, with European visits in search of food peaking in the mid-eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century and with the advent of the steamship, fewer merchants tended to call at Madagascar for provisions as they crossed the oceans.17
Despite the short-lived role of the island as an important node in transoceanic trade, these years of exchanges would have far-reaching ramifications for both the islanders and Europeans who encountered one another across the feasting table. The sudden presence of kings wielding firearms in Madagascar’s ports was the clearest innovation. As elsewhere in Africa, these individuals seemed to gain power as a consequence of the slave trade. Scholars from J. E. Inikori to Warren Whatley have repeatedly emphasized the negative impact of the transatlantic slave trade on African societies and noted an increase in political instability and economic impoverishment during the era of the slave trade. The transatlantic slave trade produced “a series of unfortunate transformations” in Africa, in the words of Patrick Manning.18
More recently, some historians have presented a more nuanced version of this history. By identifying the traffic in slaves as part of broader economic transformations within the continent, they suggest that while the slave trade was disruptive, it did not completely sever trading connections between African communities, nor did the trade completely destroy opportunities for economic advancement for some Africans. Some of this literature focuses on understanding the transition to “legitimate” (non-slave) commerce, frequently in agriculture, following abolition, but a number of historical studies have been published recently that examine the florescence of other production, also agricultural, in the midst of the transatlantic slave trade. Despite these efforts to consider the slave trade in a broader context, most historians would still agree that it is impossible to write about African communities on the shores of the Atlantic without examining the role the transatlantic slave trade played in their histories.19
The history of Madagascar reveals even more powerfully that the traffic in slaves was not the only factor contributing to violent political transformations within Africa. Guns were purchased not only with slaves but also with bags of rice on the shores of Madagascar. In 1600, individuals sold cattle for iron wire or colored beads in St. Augustin Bay. Scarcely a century later in the same location, a ruler known as Prince Will dictated the exact weight of gunpowder he would accept for a strong bull. State rulers also engaged in frequent battles with their neighbors, which contributed to a brief period of large-scale slaving from the island and the intensified use of unfree labor within the island itself. Leaders in Madagascar sought to defend and expand their political authority; as in Dahomey, this was a “period marked by war, political instability, and economic turbulence.”20 However, unlike West Africans, the islanders engaged in warfare to obtain and protect food supplies, as well as to acquire captives.
Until the early seventeenth century, much of the island’s trade was overseen by merchants in the north of Madagascar who wore robes of imported cloth and spoke some Kiswahili. In their harbors, East India ships anchored beside East African vessels, as the captains of both sought to purchase captives from coastal rulers. The merchants of Madagascar, emboldened by this competition for their exports, demanded fine Asian cloth and silver from passing European merchants but did not rely on this trade as a base for their continued political power.21 This picture would change dramatically by the close of the century. Although the political changes that came to the island following the arrival of Europeans were felt first and most strongly in the south, not the north, even this part of the island was eventually enveloped by waves of warfare emanating from elsewhere on the island.
The history of provisioning from Madagascar thus brings together two seemingly disparate pasts and processes, of African societies negatively impacted by the slave trade and communities along the Indian Ocean engaging with European merchants from a position of strength. Direct engagement with global commercial networks contributed to turmoil throughout Madagascar by providing new opportunities for some, but not all, on the island.22 The provisioning trade from Madagascar predated, complemented, and contributed to the large-scale export of slaves, yet the rise of this trade was in some senses a historical accident. That the island became a center of provisioning was due as much to the island’s geographical advantages and the unique demands of European maritime trade as to the availability of food on the island’s shores.
PROVISIONING INDIAN OCEAN COMMERCE
This perspective on trade from Madagascar is at odds with that presented in some publications examining early modern global commerce. The maps and accompanying narratives in these publications suggest that trade from Africa was primarily in captives (from West Africa to the Americas) and, from Asia, in pepper and silk intended for elite European consumption.23 In both cases, the distraction posed by the horrific sale of humans on one hand, and that of luxury goods on the other, has led us away from studying the more routine and short-distance exchanges that supported global commerce. By focusing on higher-value goods, entire parts of the world, including Madagascar, disappear from maps of commerce that also ignore the complex trade routes that existed within regions and between the land and sea.24 In fact, frequent short-haul trips by vessels carrying woods, foodstuffs, and simple cloth underpinned exchanges in the Indian Ocean for centuries prior to the arrival of European ships. These premodern exchanges, according to Michael N. Pearson, had a much longer history and proved more stable over the longue durée than more expensive exports of luxury items. The circulation of necessities by land and sea also shaped trade routes within the ocean well before the arrival of Europeans in 1498, although such trades have proved difficult to trace and have attracted only limited attention from scholars.25
The continued emphasis on luxury goods is apparent in publications on European oceanic explorations after the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.26 In his Histoire de l’océan Indien, Auguste Toussaint describes how spices fueled European competition, but gives no
