| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 240 words from this article are provided below; about 539 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Pier M. Larson. History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770–1822. (Social History of Africa.) Portsmouth: Heinemann. 2000. Pp. xxxii, 414. Cloth $65.00, paper $24.95.

Pier M. Larson undertakes two tasks: the first, which he thinks of as "the traditional sort," is using archival sources to write a "guild" history of the Madagascar slave trade. The second, much closer to Larson's heart, is taking popular Malagasy Tantara narratives as "social memory" and using this evidence "creatively and critically" (p. 164) to account for the emergence of the Merina kingdom and a Merina collective identity at the time of the slave trade. Larson's preference for social memory reflects his wish to reverse the trend in the writing of African history that he claims, fairly, has been based almost exclusively on archival (i.e. European) evidence to the neglect of Africans' own "memories" or "memorial evidence." Larson regards archival and memorial evidence as "complementary, not equivalent" representations of the past (p. 263), both necessary to reconstruct African history as are "quantitative assessment" and "qualitative work" (p. 282). Larson claims, too, that social memory is the only evidence available to reclaim the past of Africa's own massive, internal slave populations. Their history has been largely omitted from studies of the African diaspora, which, Larson states, "has always privileged the experience of Africans in the Americas over the continent [of Africa]" (p. 269). . . .

There are about 539 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.