Feeding Globalization. Jane Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ from the entire west coast of Madagascar throughout the eighteenth century.

      Following the rise of these two states, visits by European vessels to Madagascar became more regular and reliable, as described in chapter 5. This increased regularity was facilitated by the development of secure relationships between rulers and the Europeans who frequented the island. These alliances were cemented through elaborate rituals that included feasts and gift exchanges, with these rituals effectively eliminating other coastal people from participating in exchanges. In the explosion of documentation that accompanied their visits, European officers revealed that they were in fear during their stays on the island due to a lack of control over sailors on shore and on ship. Their fears manifested themselves in both a desire for the quick loading of provisions as well as a growing dependence on rulers to help them maintain control over subordinates on the beaches of Madagascar.

      Chapter 6 describes how European struggles for dominance within the Indian Ocean during the mid-eighteenth century culminated in the battles of the Seven Years’ War. The outbreak of war led to the French and British forging closer relationships with coastal rulers as their ships halted frequently in the ports of Madagascar for provisions. The French in particular invested a great deal of energy and resources in attempting to colonize the island repeatedly during the second half of the eighteenth century. As a result, by the start of the nineteenth century both the French and British were interested in a more permanent trading presence in Madagascar.

      Competition for food and labor increased sharply within the region by the late eighteenth century, as described in chapter 7, and resulted in several important shifts in the use and sale of slave labor from the island. The rising demand from Europeans, particularly the French, for slaves from Madagascar coincided with a marked decline in the availability of enslaved laborers from the shores of the island. Slaves became scarcer and more expensive. The transformation of the slave trade, in terms of prices and availability, only makes sense in the context of the expanding provisioning trade, as coastal rulers were retaining slaves to work in a productive capacity on the island, and selling them, along with food, in return for silver coins. By the close of the century, communities within Madagascar even began to import enslaved laborers from East Africa to augment this work force.

      Chapter 8 reveals how coastal populations responded to the heightened demand for laborers by turning beyond the island’s shores to acquire slaves. Between roughly 1790 and 1820, hundreds of islanders left the eastern and western coasts of Madagascar annually in fleets of canoes, paddling toward the nearby Comoro Islands and East Africa. These armed men launched attacks on coastal populations, kidnapping large portions of the Comoro Islands population and forcing East Africans to flee into the interior of the continent. According to Comorians remembering the chaos decades later, all those who could fight were killed and those who could not fight were captured and enslaved by the soldiers. These exceptionally large and coordinated attacks, which unsettled communities throughout the region, can only be understood in the context of the competition introduced by the provisioning trade to Madagascar as well as the Comoros.

      The slaving raids on the Comoro Islands and in coastal East Africa at the turn of the nineteenth century were the culmination of pressures introduced by global trade. The pressures that accompanied the arrival of global commerce by the nineteenth century, while distinct from those placed by the demand for slaves or luxury exports from Atlantic Africa or Southeast Asia, were very real. European merchants originally entered the Indian Ocean in search of lucrative trading opportunities. The pepper and cloves they returned with fetched astronomical prices back in Europe, at least initially. To make these multiyear journeys, Dutch merchants found themselves bartering with merchants in Madagascar for a few bags of rice. The English used glass beads to buy live cattle on the island to sustain their voyages to the Arabian Peninsula. The French staved off famine with food staples from Madagascar. The provisioning of European vessels did not just shape island societies but also European successes and failures.

      Throughout this period of violence and negotiation, the feasting table provided a moment of repose for European and coastal elites. The feast also serves as a metaphor for understanding the important, if tenuous, relationship formed between those who came to the beaches of Madagascar in search of trading partners. Access to the table was a mark of status and power for Europeans and islanders alike. The coercion involved in the growing and sale of the food was beneath the notice of those who ate plentiful amounts of beef stew and rice at the feast, but it provided a constant threat to the continued success of this celebratory moment.

       TWO

      “The Richest and Most Fruitful Island in the World”

      AN ENGLISH VISITOR TO Madagascar published a pamphlet with this title in 1643, following the publication of his other tract (A Paradox: Prooving, That the Inhabitants of the Isle called Madagascar . . . Are the Happiest People in the World) just three years prior.¹ Expressing such a positive view of Madagascar was not unusual in the seventeenth century. In fact, notions of Madagascar as a fertile land for both settlement and agricultural production date back a century earlier, when the first European ships arrived at its shores. In their sixteenth-century reports back to Europe, the Portuguese emphasized the plentiful supplies of food and slaves they had found. By 1609, people all over Europe had heard of the “extremely rich, powerful, and famous island of Madagascar . . . which in our days is considered as the largest in all the world.”² The island was rumored to be home to exotic wildlife such as giraffes and elephants, as well as gold and silver mines.³ Such legends encouraged a widespread fascination with the exotic flora and fauna on Madagascar, while making little mention of the people already inhabiting this apparent paradise.

      European writers celebrated the natural fertility of an island perceived as an untouched and sparsely populated Eden.⁴ An English poem was even written celebrating this point and imagining the glory of conquering such an island, “scenting of rich gummes.”⁵ Throughout Madagascar, according to one visitor, “Glens and slopes, hills, mountains, and valleys are enhanced by beautiful glimpses of dense woods, flourishing acres, and verdant fields. The fruitful earth only has to thank mother nature, that it, through her more than any effort of a zealous farmer, yields more fruits than there are hands to pick.”⁶ This and other such descriptions imply that the land was so naturally productive that Europeans with their agricultural skills could quickly transform the land into a granary to support their operations throughout the ocean.

      Not only was the island described as richly fertile, but it was also known to be a huge landmass, almost continental in size. In one report defending the French decision to place a colony on the island, the writer noted that Madagascar was the fourth largest island in the world, larger even than England.⁷ The idea that a small French settlement could eventually control the entire island attracted interest back in Europe. In fact, virtually every seventeenth-century description of Madagascar began with an estimate of the size of the island and noted that it was far larger than necessary to support its small (according to Europeans) human population. Indeed, the island was so expansive that it would be several centuries before a European successfully crossed it and described the interior accurately. Before they did so, fantastic descriptions of the island’s animals featured prominently in early modern European publications.⁸

      Practical concerns were initially responsible for attracting Europeans to the shores of the island, located roughly at the halfway point for voyages from Europe to Asia. Europeans learned that provisions were not as readily available in all islands and ports throughout the Indian Ocean. Unlike other coastal trading centers and settlements in the western Indian Ocean, such as Mozambique Island or Aden, the entrepôts of Madagascar drew upon a relatively rich foreland and hinterland, both capable СКАЧАТЬ