Feeding Globalization. Jane Hooper

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      A major shift occurred during the first half of the seventeenth century, on the shores of Madagascar as well as throughout the Indian Ocean, as other European trading groups arrived to compete with the Portuguese. Between roughly 1590 and 1650, European rivalries for access to the spice trade meant groups such as the Dutch and English fixated on spices and little else. Their efforts led to the creation of monopoly trading companies such as the English East India Company (EIC) in 1601 and the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) in 1602. The French followed shortly thereafter with their own series of trading companies in the ocean, most noteworthy being the Compagnie des indes orientales, which went through several iterations throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁴⁶ Initially lacking strong provisioning centers in the southwestern Indian Ocean, all three European groups were drawn to Madagascar.

      The Dutch were interested in using food and slaves from Madagascar to support their ventures in Indonesia and along the Red Sea. Dutch visits to the island predated the founding of the VOC, with the first ships sailing from the Netherlands to Madagascar in 1695. Once VOC voyages into the Indian Ocean began, their settler colonies in Batavia (Jakarta), Mauritius, and the Cape all imported rice and enslaved laborers from Madagascar. EIC captains were first drawn to the southwestern coast of Madagascar, distant from parts of the island visited by the Portuguese and Dutch. For two centuries, several EIC ships visited the west coast of the island annually on their way to EIC posts in India and Indonesia. Searching for a strong base to support their commerce in Asia and the Middle East, the French settled on the nearby Mascarene Islands by the late seventeenth century, abandoning attempts to live on Madagascar itself. Even once they set up homes and ports in the islands of Mauritius (Île de France) and Réunion (Île Bourbon), the French imported hundreds of slaves, cattle, and bags of rice annually from the larger island to their west.

      Between 1600 and 1800, the English, Dutch, and French all tried to create colonies and permanent trading posts on Madagascar but made few intentional and successful incursions inland, as the islanders fought firmly against European settlement. The French alone sponsored at least four failed settlements on the island during the eighteenth century. French persistence reveals the central importance of Madagascar to European plans for expansion in the ocean, but also the severe shortcomings in their perceptions of the reality of life on Madagascar’s shores. Even as these colonies failed, European captains repeatedly turned their ships to the island when they needed laborers or food.

      In Madagascar, as elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, local and intra-ocean trade remained vibrant 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 СКАЧАТЬ