Feeding Globalization - Jane Hooper Indian Ocean Studies Series

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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 trade.”125 Yet the domination of the provisioning trade was also key to Sakalava maintenance of other sources of power, including supplies of slaves. After all, Drury noted that Menabe was one of the richest provinces on the island, not due to the slave trade, but thanks to plentiful supplies of foodstuffs. Drury describes how, during a feast following a series of successful battles, military leaders (all of whom ritually communicated their submission to the Sakalava king by licking his feet) consumed four calabashes of “toak” (toaka, alcohol), along with honey, sugar cane, rice, and a large amount of beef. It was the best meal Drury had consumed during his many years on the island.126 This food, acquired through a complex alliance of tributaries as much as through warfare, attested to the ability of Sakalava rulers to access labor and resources on Madagascar.

       FOUR

      The Betsimisaraka, Pirate Kings

      BETWEEN THE 1680S AND 1720s, dozens of Anglo-American pirates spent months living on the shores of Madagascar.1 These privateers and pirates of the Caribbean were seeking richer shores for plunder, and the lands of the Indian Ocean were more distant from increasingly critical politicians in Europe and the Americas.2 Piracy in the Indian Ocean, as in the Atlantic, offered opportunities for those seeking an alternative social order, as well as material advancement otherwise barred by current legal frameworks.3 Yet the distinction between merchant and pirate was fuzzy, in part due to the long-running history of maritime violence within the Indian Ocean.4 Piracy was present well before 1498 and, after this date, the labeling of individuals or groups as pirates became a means for advancing the economic and political goals of European merchants operating in the ocean.5 As soon as the Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean, they attempted to label their competitors as pirates but would turn the other way when their allies attacked merchant vessels. As other European groups arrived in the ocean, many Portuguese themselves were labeled as pirates, and traders of any nation who flouted monopoly laws became known as interlopers.6 Madagascar became a space where these contests over legitimacy and sovereignty would play out.

      By the late seventeenth century, many Anglo-American pirates had chosen Madagascar as their destination. The choice to visit and stay there was not haphazard but instead predicated on the geographical opportunities afforded by the island as a base of operation, as well as the supplies of food and slaves already known to be available on its shores. The absence of European company control over Madagascar was an additional attraction. In short, the pirates came to Madagascar for the same reasons the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English had been arriving for decades: the island offered convenience, security, and economic opportunities.

      The pirates were some of the most memorable of visitors to the island during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The exploits of swashbucklers filled numerous broadsheets and novels back in Europe and contributed to a major shift in attitudes toward Madagascar.7 The history of pirates on the island has, in turn, received considerable attention from scholars.8 In fact, Madagascar is only mentioned in some histories of the Indian Ocean when they discuss this “Golden Age” of piracy, despite the limited political and economic influence the pirates exercised on the island.9 Public interest in the activities of pirates far predated the twenty-first century and the sensationalist and popular literature spawned by the pirates has resulted in substantial liberties being taken with the history of the island. For instance, a popular but largely fictionalized account of the pirates on the island, perhaps penned by Daniel Defoe, presents Madagascar as a pirate paradise, welcoming to all seeking liberty.10

      These sensationalist stories of Madagascar as a pirate safe haven are at odds with the more reliable sources that reveal the quotidian nature of interactions between pirates and islanders. The pirates who came to Madagascar could be placed into one of two categories: they were either maritime raiders who preyed upon shipping in the ocean or resident merchants who sought to evade monopoly controls. The most important foreigners, those who spent significant time on the island, were more akin to the latter, acting as independent merchants and rarely taking part in the clashes at sea popularized in pirate literature. The pirate communities that inhabited Madagascar maintained frequent commercial and legal contact with North America, as historian Kevin McDonald has recently revealed.11 Once the pirates arrived on the island, many of them followed the model set by French colonists decades earlier and incorporated themselves into local families. Many of these pirates were slave traders. Trading in southeast Africa was illegal under the charter of most of the East India Companies, but it was much easier to escape the attention of authorities on the east coast of Africa, where the volume of trade and shipping was far below that of West Africa.12 In one famous case, Frederick Philipse of New York switched his focus from slave trading in the Congo region in the 1680s and dispatched traders to arrange the purchase of slaves from Madagascar. These traders would be described as pirates by the English.13 The pirates were able to oversee the transportation of thousands of people from Madagascar in one of the longest (and most deadly) Middle Passages in world history.14 These pirates primarily served as cross-cultural brokers, in parallel roles to the Indian Ocean merchants who operated outside of state control. They learned the languages of the ports in which they resided and visited and acquired homes and families in far-flung ports around the ocean’s littoral, including in northern Madagascar.15

      While the slave trade between Madagascar and North America was encouraged by the pirates’ presence in Madagascar, the deeper roots of transoceanic commerce from Madagascar cannot be neglected. Anglo-American pirates were just

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