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Book Review
Sub-Saharan Africa
| Gwyn Campbell. An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895: The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire. (African Studies Series, number 106.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xvii, 413. $90.00.
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| No scholar interested in Madagascar's history or slavery in the southwest Indian Ocean is ignorant of the copious work of economic historian Gwyn Campbell, and for the first time the bulk of his efforts in these domains is available in a single monograph. This book commenced as a doctoral dissertation and passed through article versions to final appearance here. With some revisions, the separately published pieces are now gathered as chapters three through twelve of this twelve-chapter work. One has to know Campbell's long efforts to recognize this, for nowhere in the volume is the history and provenance of the book's heft acknowledged. A number of difficulties flow from this structure. |
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But like Campbell's articles over the last twenty years, the essays gathered in this, his first monograph, speak to critical issues in the history of Madagascar and the slave trade in the southwest Indian Ocean. The unifying interpretation is that the kingdom of highland Madagascar with its capital at Antananarivo became an island empire in the course of the nineteenth century, one whose pretensions to territorial hegemony were never fully realized. This interpretation has much to offer. Campbell argues forcefully and correctly for continuities between the early nineteenth-century regimes of sovereigns Radama and Ranavalona, amplifying the work of predecessors and showing how each leader sought to domesticate European technologies to create an autarkic and self-sustaining economy. Campbell's most original argument, it seems to me, is his claim (chapter five) that forced labor became the backbone of Madagascar's "imperial" economy, whereas slavery was much more marginal. There are also detailed outlines of the island's foreign trade, its transport and communications systems, its currency and finance, and the role of Madagascar in the scramble for colonies in the Indian Ocean. |
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This book is an economic tour de force around "Imperial Madagascar." The assortment of archival sources in European languages on which the work draws is breathtaking, a testimony to Campbell's broad excavation of collections. What strikes this reader, though, is that despite a diversity of foundations Campbell's vision remains uniquely state-focused and elite-oriented while at the same time aspiring to a "comprehensive economic history of precolonial Madagascar." What the author means by "Imperial Madagascar" is the polity whose capital was Antananarivo. It was for the constitution and maintenance of this state that forced labor became more important than slavery, that transport and communications were directed, and that trade policy was formulated. What we do not understand from these essays is the more "comprehensive" constellation of economic issues facing different entities and affecting everyday lives, from households taking decisions about agriculture and trade, to descent groups concerned about the loss of members to corvée, to the economic calculations of polities outside "Imperial Madagascar." We learn of trade in those regions "independent" of Antananarivo, but from the European archive and without an eye to the intentions of the people making economic decisions. There is data aplenty, but the perspective and explanatory apparatus seems inflexible. |
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