to how men on board the vessels transporting these commodities were fed.27 In his lengthy histories of the Indian Ocean, K. N. Chaudhuri likewise restricts food to discussions about regional patterns of consumption among coastal populations.28 In spite of these omissions, alongside the trade in silks and spices were indispensable exports of food that forced regular contact between Europeans and a diverse number of communities around the world. Spices, after all, were nutritionally “superfluous,” according to one popular history.29
The focus on spices and silks can lead historians to exclude the participation of groups such as the people of Madagascar who engaged frequently in trade, but rarely provided Europeans with expensive exports.30 In recent years, scholars such as Judith Carney have focused on the role that African agricultural labor played in the expanding global economy.31 The food production and exports from Indian Ocean societies likewise reveal the contributions of a more diverse group of people in fueling resource-intensive global commerce during the early modern period. It is unsurprising that the few scholars of Indian Ocean history who do mention provisioning primarily focus on coastal East African communities.32
Access to food supplies motivated Europeans to explore the Atlantic and determined the conduct of their trade in the ports of West Africa and the Indian Ocean.33 Trade between Europe and Asia was even more resource intensive than that within the Atlantic, particularly in terms of the materials required to build, maintain, fuel, and sustain the crews of merchant fleets on extremely long voyages. Building upon experiences trading in northwestern Africa and the Mediterranean, European merchants at first tried to carry necessities from Europe, and only occasionally purchase additional supplies during their time in the Indian Ocean.34 This strategy quickly proved unfeasible. Europeans realized that they needed to find reliable sources for obtaining additional provisions before arriving at their destinations in India and the Middle East, especially as the risk of sudden, unforeseen challenges ran high on lengthy voyages. Storms could place stores of food in danger and delay voyages, with deadly consequences. Leaky barrels ruined meat and bread; spoiled food led to the under-nourishment of crew members, which further imperiled the success of a voyage. With the existence of such serious dangers, finding and maintaining access to reliable sources of food became paramount.
In a competitive environment where the speed with which merchants delivered nutmeg and silks to Europe determined the profit from their trading missions, securing rapid local access to the right types of food was crucial. Unlike Indian Ocean merchants, European traders did not arrive during one season and wait for a change in the monsoon winds to depart again. European arrivals in the ocean were less predictable and required much larger supplies of provisions than vessels working within the Indian Ocean. European traders also focused on acquiring certain food items to supplement stores of hard biscuit and dried meat, either because they kept well on long transoceanic voyages or due to beliefs about their medicinal powers. Ships required rice, legumes, tubers (including manioc, widely used to feed slaves by the late eighteenth century), fruit to prevent and treat scurvy, and, above all else, fresh or salted beef, believed at the time to be capable of curing numerous diseases and conditions.35 Rice was particularly valued for its portability and was perceived in multiple cultural contexts as suitable for elite consumption.36 Europeans shipped rice from India, Indonesia, and Madagascar to their settlements throughout the entire Indian Ocean.37 Scholars have tended to understand the transformation of certain food items into commodities, goods with identifiable values and produced for export, as a development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.38 Yet certain desirable food staples such as rice reached this status much earlier in provisioning locations such as Madagascar. In this case, the markets were not in distant Europe but instead within European ships themselves.
Europeans, unlike other traders circulating through the Indian Ocean, needed to acquire these items quickly, and in extremely large quantities, to avoid long waits and an increase in the mortality rate on board their vessels while at anchor. Given these constraints, Europeans learned to frequent certain ports and develop preferential trading relationships with the communities, including those within Madagascar, that had adjusted to their demands. Not all parts of the ocean’s shores were as welcoming to European traders. Many port cities in the Indian Ocean lay beside regions poor in natural resources where food needed to be transported from far in the interior to the coast or imported from overseas.39 John Richards and Edmund Burke III have noted that increased food production during the early modern period had a negative impact on the environment. This was likely the case for many locations along the ocean’s littoral where food had to be brought from increasingly distant hinterlands, making supplies of food more limited and expensive for Europeans.40
Even within Madagascar, food had to be transported from the interior of the island to the coasts. Tracing the movement of food highlights lines of connection, as well as differentiation, between hinterland and littoral societies. The transportation of goods to the coast relied upon either coordinated independent traders or state-controlled commerce. As rice was harvested in the interiors of Africa and Asia and shipped to shores, it changed hands dozens of times and moved through diverse landscapes of power. Without examining the exports of mundane provisions alongside those of luxuries and slaves, it would be impossible to trace the deep roots of globalizing trade in the lands surrounding the Indian Ocean. By looking at the movement of food within Madagascar in particular, it becomes clear that almost the entire island, including its highly productive interior, was responsible for provisioning European voyages.
European trading companies also developed settler colonies that would serve as centers for growing or accumulating the necessary provisions, an action that further increased the impact of human populations in previously unpopulated areas or regions of low population density. Many of these colonies, whether in Southeast Asia, Africa, or on offshore African islands, required vast supplies of food and labor to be regularly imported from neighboring Indian Ocean communities.41 Europeans in these locations encountered similar challenges as other groups living along the ocean’s littoral and struggled to grow sufficient supplies of food in only marginally fertile soil.42 Their unremitting efforts to spur on agriculture in spite of these challenges reveal the heightened value of food during an era of globalizing commerce and the need for stable locations for refueling vessels throughout the ocean.
FEEDING COMPETITION
An examination of the provisioning trade from Madagascar provides new insights into the history of European trade in the Indian Ocean by calling attention to how these practical concerns shaped European activities. Historians have been aware of the rivalries, divisions, and competition between European trading groups in the Indian Ocean starting with publications by scholars including C. R. Boxer and Holden Furber.43 Yet Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French merchants shared one characteristic that few historians note: frequent purchases of food from Madagascar to support their commerce in the ocean. Even if they did not stop at Madagascar, many European sailors consumed food produced in Madagascar at some point during their voyages within the Indian Ocean.44 For this reason, access to provisions from Madagascar helped determine the success of various merchant groups within the Indian Ocean; as such, European groups as well as African and Asian ones competed for access to the trade of the island.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, the Portuguese Estado da Índia made many attempts, but few inroads, at creating a trading monopoly in the Indian Ocean. In Madagascar as well, despite early efforts to set up commercial and missionary outposts on the island, the Portuguese were unsuccessful at securing a foothold. Representatives of the Portuguese crown, Portuguese traders, and Mozambican colonists all briefly tried to obtain spices and slaves from Madagascar during the sixteenth century but were eventually drawn to more profitable parts of the ocean in pursuit of commodities. Portuguese attempts at converting the islanders were likewise abandoned by the early seventeenth century. Following these failures, the Portuguese settled on Mozambique continued to engage in trade with groups living within the southwestern Indian Ocean region, including with those in Madagascar who had large supplies of rice and cattle for sale. Portuguese (or Portuguese-sponsored) vessels
