Feeding Globalization

Madagascar and the Provisioning Trade, 1600–1800

Jane Hooper

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780821445945
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Between 1600 and 1800, the promise of fresh food attracted more than seven hundred English, French, and Dutch vessels to Madagascar. Throughout this period, European ships spent months at sea in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, but until now scholars have not fully examined how crews were fed during these long voyages. Without sustenance from Madagascar, European traders would have struggled to transport silver to Asia and spices back to Europe. Colonies in Mozambique, Mauritius, and at the Cape relied upon frequent imports from Madagascar to feed settlers and slaves.

In Feeding Globalization, Jane Hooper draws on challenging and previously untapped sources to analyze Madagascar's role in provisioning European trading networks within and ultimately beyond the Indian Ocean. The sale of food from the island not only shaped trade routes and colonial efforts but also encouraged political centralization and the slave trade in Madagascar. Malagasy people played an essential role in supporting European global commerce, with far-reaching effects on their communities.

Feeding Globalization reshapes our understanding of Indian Ocean and global history by insisting historians should pay attention to the role that food played in supporting other exchanges.

ONE

Feasts and Violence

MORE THAN EIGHT HUNDRED European and American ships arrived at the island of Madagascar during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The men on board these vessels immediately sought fresh provisions from the coastal rulers who greeted them on the shores of the island. One such vessel was the Cape slaving ship, the Brack, which first arrived and anchored in St. Augustin Bay (alternatively, Saint Augustine’s Bay) on July 26, 1741. O. L. Hemmy, the first commies (trade commissioner) on board, was responsible for securing slaves for the Dutch colony in southern Africa, but his first concern was finding food and water for the crew. Fortunately for Hemmy, although the shoreline appeared dry and barren, people approached the ship with oranges, chicken, and fish for sale. A leader identified as Prince William greeted the Dutch and agreed to supply them with cattle. Despite this warm welcome, Hemmy was told that he had to visit King Baba to the north if he wished to purchase more valuable commodities, namely rice and slaves.¹

Hemmy and his companions were escorted by royal representatives to the nearby port of Toliara (Tulear, Tuléar). Hundreds of armed men surrounded the beach. King Baba was seated on a small bench, with an asseegaye (spear) to one side and a particularly handsome “English” gun on the other. The king was dressed in fine cloth and wearing an opulent necklace made of gold, silver, and glass beads. As Hemmy approached, the king immediately demanded to see a formal letter of introduction from the Cape Colony governor. One of the king’s trusted advisers, Captain James, read and translated the letter for the king.² The king requested a bottle of arrack, a type of strong alcohol, which was quickly drained, as was a second bottle. Momentarily satisfied, King Baba invited the commies to dine and promised to kill a bull, as was his custom to celebrate the arrival of traders.³

Hemmy was led to the king’s palace, where he sat beside low wooden planks and was invited to eat. The meal featured pieces of cooked meat with skin and hair still attached, complemented with dishes of cooked potatoes and rice stewed in milk.⁴ As the king and commies began eating, the king also asked James and Jan, his other adviser, to join in the feasting. The king told the Dutchman that if the meat was not to his liking, he could have it prepared in the “English way.” Hemmy replied that it was very good, as he was quite hungry, and he explained that he hoped they could “live as brothers.”⁵ During the meal, bottle after bottle of arrack was consumed by the participants after the king rejected a bottle of Cape red wine as “not healthy with such sweetness.” In the king’s estimation, arrack was the most suitable for a powerful ruler and Hemmy had no choice but to supply it in vast quantities. After the king had eaten his fill, the Dutch soldiers received the leftovers.⁶

As they were concluding their feast, King Baba announced to Hemmy that “I am a great king. I have people and livestock, greens, rice, and land in abundance. Come now with your ship and stay two or three months. I will give you slaves and all the things you may wish for.”⁷ The king’s speech marked the end of formalities and the start of trading negotiations. His comments also served as a reminder that this scene of peaceful feasting took place during a period of intense violence, when many on the island were restricted from receiving even a bite of food from the feasts. Instead, these islanders were at risk of being enslaved and sold to foreign slavers. Between 1500 and 1800, an estimated 292,000 people from Madagascar were transported to slave markets on the Indian Ocean; a third of these were shipped to European forts and plantations that encircled the ocean’s littoral. A further sixteen thousand traveled to the Americas where they would be sold, if they survived the extremely long journey, along with more than six million other Africans forcibly transported to the Americas.⁸ The violence in and around Madagascar was on a scale typically associated with the transatlantic slave trade from western Africa. While persons taken from Madagascar formed a relatively small part of the magnitude crossing both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, this traffic transformed Madagascar itself. Connecting populations on the island to the growing global demand for coerced labor, it introduced immense upheaval.⁹

Despite the central importance of the slave trade to the history of Madagascar, out of the more than eight hundred voyages to the island, only about a third of the English, French, and Dutch vessels that stopped there between 1600 and 1800 carried traders in search of slaves. The others loaded valuable supplies of food, wood, and water during their stays on the island.¹⁰ The island’s coastal ports and communities began to specialize in a bustling export trade in rice and cattle, with slaves sold to Europeans when food supplies were less abundant. The sale of captives became an alternative route for acquiring European imports. Following the intensification of food production on the island by the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves were relatively scarce and also expensive, being priced in silver coins that Europeans found challenging to procure.

Provisions, however, were still easy to obtain from coastal rulers. Without fresh supplies of food from Madagascar, European vessels would have struggled to carry silver to Asia and spices back to Europe. Colonists in the Mascarene Islands and in southern Africa relied upon frequent imports from the large island, as their colonies were located on lands of strategic importance but only marginal fertility. Rice from Madagascar filled the stomachs of the Europeans who supervised the labor of East African and Malagasy slaves working in plantations in Mauritius. English sailors eagerly consumed fresh beef from cattle originally purchased in Madagascar en route to India. Oranges and lemons from Madagascar revived soldiers suffering from scurvy following long months at sea. Pirates, including the famous Captain Kidd, spent time on the shores of Madagascar hoping to benefit from trading with prosperous island communities.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these disparate groups arrived at the shores of Madagascar in search of fresh food and alliances. They “lived as brothers” with coastal rulers after sharing bowls overflowing with cooked beef and rice. That some of this food had been produced using slave labor or obtained through warfare scarcely concerned the Dutch or other visitors. The provisioning trade brought Madagascar to the center of global trading networks that intersected in the southwestern Indian Ocean. The resulting global connections enabled the islanders to sustain contacts with New York pirates and South African slavers, among others. Throughout, food served as a ritual marker of culture and status, imbued with social meaning going well beyond simple consumption. This was, after all, a world where only certain types of alcohol were deemed suitable for royalty. Only rulers and captains, those who participated in the ritual feasts, regularly consumed beef and white rice, while others were lucky if they received the leftovers.¹¹

FEEDING RULERS

For people in Madagascar, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ushered in dramatic political transformations, thanks in part to this provisioning trade. These two hundred years were a period of intense change for groups throughout Eurasia and along the Indian Ocean littoral.¹² The sudden appearance of 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Advance Praise for Feeding Globalization
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1. Feasts and Violence
• 2. “The Richest and Most Fruitful Island in the World”
• 3. The Sakalava: From Warriors to Merchants
• 4. The Betsimisaraka, Pirate Kings
• 5. Rituals of Consumption, Rituals of Domination
• 6. European Warfare and Imperialism
• 7. Slaving Failures
• 8. Exporting Violence to the Comoros
• 9. From Feasts to Famine
• Appendix. Sources for Figures
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index