Feeding Globalization. Jane Hooper
throughout this entire precolonial period, in spite of the sudden rise of military states on the island’s shores.47 European merchants discovered that they faced strong competition not only from other Europeans and Americans on the shores of Madagascar but also from non-European groups operating throughout the ocean. European, African, and Asian merchants interacted, cooperated, and clashed, as Europeans attempted to insert themselves into centuries-old patterns of exchange. Operating from a position of strength, islanders, usually under strong oversight by their rulers, could afford to strike tough bargains. In Madagascar, Europeans consistently dealt with trading partners who were aware of the Europeans’ need for food and took advantage of their desperation whenever possible.48 In light of this competition, European weakness in terms of dominating commerce in the ocean, as highlighted by Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Sugata Bose, was apparent on the shores of Madagascar.49 Even on this relatively distant island of seemingly limited value, Europeans struggled to maintain their access to trade, a reminder that European economic and political expansion was checked by other thriving exchange networks within and around the ocean’s littoral.
As the end of the eighteenth century approached, a period that many historians of the Indian Ocean identify as ushering in a major shift of power in favor of European (especially British) imperialism, European trading companies came increasingly into conflict with non-European states and empires. Most of the historical scholarship dealing with this shift focuses on the Indian subcontinent, but even from the perspective of Madagascar, a shift in engagement was clearly occurring.50 Although formal European annexation was still more than a century in the future for the islanders, new colonial ventures by Europeans in Asia had a lasting impact on the provisioning trade from Madagascar. Battles between the British and French in the northern Indian Ocean attracted European vessels into the ocean in larger numbers. These fleets of warships relied upon Madagascar for food to feed their sailors and soldiers with increasing frequency. During a single visit, the British might buy hundreds of bags of rice from the northwest coast of the island, while the French shipped hundreds, or even thousands, of live cattle from the opposite coast of Madagascar to the Mascarene Islands. By the close of the eighteenth century, after years of repeated and growing demands for food, the imports provided by the provisioning trade had led to not just an expansion of military state control on Madagascar, but greater economic connections within the island and perhaps the increased use of enslaved laborers to produce food for consumption and export to meeting this rising demand for provisions.
EUROPEAN SHIP RECORDS AS SOURCES
This book uses the vantage point of the shores of Madagascar to examine the impact of global trade on Indian Ocean communities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This history is revealed through a careful reading of records left by the European and American traders, missionaries, and colonists who visited the shores of Madagascar. Feeding Globalization relies heavily on almost three hundred ship records similar to the journal left by the commies of the Brack.51 European ship logs from such vessels provide detailed daily commentary, as seen in the many recent publications that focus on single slaving voyages in the Atlantic or Indian Oceans.52 The records kept on board vessels in the Atlantic such as the Diligent reveal the experience of slave loading, the brutality of the Middle Passage, and the cruel calculations involved in the sale of Africans in the Americas. Such revelations reach beyond the experience of a single slaving voyage and speak to the uneven connections forged between Europeans, Africans, and Americans during this globalizing era.53 The complex calculus involved in the slave trade, as Stephanie Smallwood points out in her study of the trade from the Gold Coast, enables historians to uncover both how Europeans attempted to create commodities from human bodies and the ways in which Africans resisted this development.54
Ship records do not simply illuminate the inner workings of the slave trade, but also provide context for understanding the evolution of trade within Africa, as is clear in the records of both slaving and merchant vessels. In these sources, European observations include, out of necessity, reference to major political, economic, and social changes in the ports they visited, whether they halted in search of slaves or provisions. The observations were preserved by trading companies and colonial governments seeking to amass knowledge about far-flung locations.55 These ship records are even more valuable for understanding historical developments within Madagascar than elsewhere in Africa, as we have fewer details about political and economic shifts on the island prior to the nineteenth century. The close relationship forged between merchant and creole populations, enabled by the presence of resident Europeans on the Atlantic coast of many West African regions, was entirely absent from most of Madagascar until the late eighteenth century.56 Instead, the brief interactions described in ship logs provide some of the most in-depth written sources available for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially given the almost complete lack of Malagasy written sources and recorded traditions for this period.
Many historical studies of pre-nineteenth-century Madagascar rely on an influential compilation of sources entitled Collection des ouvrages anciens concernant Madagascar (COACM).57 The editors of this collection translated a variety of documents, including some ship journals and logs, from Portuguese, English, and Dutch into French during the early twentieth century. The sources fill nine volumes and most are now available for free online. The collection, as some historians have suggested, is far from comprehensive and not always accurate, and every attempt has been made to consult the original sources for this book.58 EIC records, for instance, are almost entirely absent from COACM, as are many VOC sources. When they are present, the editors provide highly abridged versions and historians have challenged the translations provided in the volumes. The very detailed logs and journals kept by VOC merchants have garnered attention in recent years, thanks to the efforts of James Armstrong and R. J. Barendse. Their publications further reveal the shortcomings of the COACM collection.59 French documents are also poorly represented in COACM, particularly colonial records from the Mascarenes.
In order to understand the role that the people of Madagascar played in feeding globalization, this book draws upon these colonial sources, in addition to English, French, and Dutch ship logs.60 Regrettably, Portuguese archival holdings have not been consulted for this book, although publications by Edward Alpers and Thomas Vernet reveal that there is much to be done in those archives.61 The records kept by the European trading companies that were consulted provide detailed descriptions of the men, women, and children who approached the newcomers on the shores of Madagascar. When looked at individually, the records of a ship’s brief visit to a port or ports in Madagascar make few apparent contributions to our understanding of the history of the island. Usually only a few pages long, such accounts might note the purchase of a certain number of cattle and barrels of rice, in return for guns or coins. After a stay lasting a few weeks, a European ship would continue to sail toward harbors in the northern Indian Ocean, where the captain could engage in trade for more valuable items. European would-be merchants would not only examine the details of a single earlier voyage, but make their navigational decisions based on a history of regular successful visits to the island. An examination of multiple ship records, for instance, reveals how the negotiations that occurred on the coast of Madagascar between rulers and captains became more reliable and regimented by the middle of the eighteenth century, thanks to this accumulated knowledge of places and people. Ship logs regularly demonstrate that assumptions were made about the goods available in a particular region and the control certain island merchants and leaders exercised over the export trade. Such beliefs became self-fulfilling prophecies, as officers sought out certain titled rulers, identified on the basis of earlier trade, to fulfill their provisioning and slaving needs.
These sources also demonstrate the challenges that European captains and officers faced over this entire period, not just in acquiring goods, but also in maintaining order on board their vessels. Life at sea enabled captains and officers to dominate the movements of their subordinates, but, once ashore, sailors were “notoriously free,” in the words of Michael Fisher, and were able to evade control to a much greater extent.62 Incidents of sailor disobedience, desertion, and disputes on the shore punctuated otherwise peaceful voyages and occurred on almost half of the recorded eighteenth-century EIC visits to Madagascar. The frequency of this resistance suggests that European leaders