The Rise of Power and the Evolution of Human Geography in the Slave Trade in Madagascar

Abstract

Being one part of the African slave trade, the slave trade in Madagascar is similar to that of the Transatlantic area. Both are destructive commercial activities that cause population loss and exacerbate social unrest and ethnic conflicts. The Kingdom of Imerina, located at Madagascar’s central plateau, thrived in the destructive slave trade by combining its trade dominance with the cultural system and created a new regime. However, different from the slave trade in most African regions, the rise of the Imerina dynasty did not lead to a shift of political and economic center to the coastal area but took on an inland-centered pattern. A comparison between the slave trade in Madagascar and the transatlantic area shows that the human-geographical patterns formed by the slave trade have their own unique historical and geographical attributes, and conclusively justify that the slave trade does not necessarily lead to preferential development of coastal areas.

Translated by Hao Yunhui.

1 Research Questions and Literature Review

African slave trade in the modern era has lasted for a long time, affecting a wide range of areas and leaving its mark in various forms all over the world. As the largest island country in Africa, Madagascar was once swept by the slave trade and became one of the origins of slave exportation.

Existing studies on the slave trade in Madagascar mainly focus on those that happened around the Indian Ocean and East Africa. Philippe Beaujard, for example, mainly examined the trade links among northern and western Madagascar, coastal areas of East Africa and Arabia before the sixteenth century, as well as the early attempts of the Portuguese to establish trade relations with Madagascar, and argued that slavery was already a significant part of Madagascar’s foreign trade before the arrival of Europeans.¹ Richard B. Allen sorted out vast literature on the slave trade between Madagascar and Mauritius/Reunion; he pointed out that for a long time, the research focus of slave trade had been on the African continent and ignored that in the Mascarene Islands.² He mainly introduced the slaves and indentured labors in Mauritius, indirectly showing the contribution of Madagascar slaves to the local development before the British occupation of Mauritius.³ J.-M. Filliot made a comprehensive investigation on the slave trade of the Mascarene area in the eighteenth century, providing plentiful data for some fundamental issues in this period, such as the volume of the slave trade and the source place and destination, etc.⁴ Deryck Scarr⁵ and Edward A. Alpers⁶ both analyzed the Imerina kingdom’s dependency on slavery from the perspective of the British attempt to abolish slavery in the Indian Ocean in the early eighteenth century. Gwyn Campbell went further on this issue by investigating the relationship between the rise and fall of the Malagasy slave trade and the waxing and waning of the local regime. However, this study remained at the level of acquiring power through material accumulation without further examining the logic of power order formation in the slave trade.⁷ In addition, David Graeber used ethnographic methods to explore the influence of social order (generated during the slave trade) on the mentality and historical cognition of the Betafo people at Central Plateau.⁸ Wendy Wilson-Fall traced individual memories of the lives of a handful of Malagasy slaves who made their way to America through the transatlantic slave trade.⁹ Yet, there are few researches on the slave trade in Madagascar in China.

Based on the existing literature concerning slave trade in Madagascar, the following two issues deserve further attention:

• 1. Slave trade is a highly destructive business activity that drains populations, undermines social trust, and intensifies communal conflict. How did the Imerina Kingdom, a new and powerful local authority, emerge from such a destructive force dominating Madagascar?

• 2. Since the Europe-dominated slave trade depended on maritime transportation, it is reasonable to expect a shift of the political and economic center to the coastal area. However, the emerging regime and human geography pattern out of slave trade in Madagascar are inland-centered. What resulted in this difference? And what is the relationship between the slave trade and the human geography patterns of relevant regions in Africa?

This paper attempts to answer the above questions in three parts. In the first part, the paper will review the situation of the slave trade in Madagascar. Data comparison with other parts of the African continent shows the distinctive characteristics of Madagascar’s slave trade, small in volume and dominated by inland ethnic groups. The second part will introduce the rise of the Imerina dynasty from the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century. It analyzes how the Malagasy slave trade established a new regime and order from the overall destructibility. The last part will compare the human-geographical pattern formed in Madagascar with that of the transatlantic regions and conclusively justify that the slave trade does not necessarily bring about the shift of political and economic center to the coastal areas. The transatlantic slave trade that prospered coastal areas has unique historical and geographical reasons.

2 A Brief Introduction to the Slave Trade in Madagascar

Research on the African slave trade can be divided into two regions—the Atlantic region and the Indian Ocean of East Africa—among which the slave trade along the Atlantic coast has received more attention. Although the slave trade in the Indian Ocean region of East Africa has a longer history, spanning extensive periods and involving trade between the East African coast and Arab countries, and the volume of the slave trade involving European countries in this area is much smaller than that of the Atlantic coast. As part of the East African region, Madagascar was also involved in the slave trade but received even less attention.

Seen from the statistics of existing historical studies, it can be concluded that about 570,000–730,000 slaves were traded and trafficked across the Indian Ocean during the three and a half centuries from 1500 to 1850, without taking into account the slave trade activities of early Arab traders. The trading network stretched from southeastern Africa, Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands to the Persian Gulf, South and Southeast Asia.¹⁰

After a comprehensive analysis of various data, it is now believed that, compared with the Indian Ocean of East Africa, more than 11 million black Africans were shipped to other continents in the transatlantic slave trade, with around 100,000 slaves being trafficked annually at its peak (see Table 1). Of all the slaves who left Africa, about 10 million reached their destination across the Atlantic, while about 1.5 million died during the journey.¹¹ About 40% of the slaves were trafficked to Brazil, another 40% to the Caribbean islands, and the rest to other parts of the Americas, including the United States.¹²

Table 1 Changes in the volume (number of people) in the transatlantic slave trade, 1550–1850Footnote

Slave Voyages, “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade—Database”, https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database#timeline, 2020–03-12.

The slave trade in Madagascar began in the late Middle Ages in Europe, and Madagascar was once included in the trading network of Indian Ocean dominated by the Islamic world. The northern and western coasts of Madagascar have had trade contacts with Zanzibar, Malindi, Mogadishu and other places in East Africa. Evidence ever shows that Arab traders had bartered cloth from India for slaves, rice and so on in Madagascar.¹⁴

After Europeans discovered Madagascar in the early sixteenth century, the west coast of the island was the first area affected by the European slave trade.¹⁵ Portuguese, who arrived first, paid more attention to the west coast because it abuts on the Mozambique Channel, an important waterway, and across the channel lay their colonies and gold-producing area. The Portuguese had already pushed inland along the Buzi River from Sofala in 1512 into what is now Zimbabwe and established trade links with the gold-rich Kingdom of Mutapa.¹⁶ The Portuguese’s initial hope was to convert Madagascar into a slave supplier, but they decided to abandon such an idea after finding its interior difficult to penetrate and its coastal population unenthusiastic about foreign trade. Eventually, they shifted their focus to the African continent. By contrast, Netherland and France, which subsequently moved into the Indian Ocean, focused more on Madagascar’s eastern coast. The reasons are as follows.¹⁷ First, the Dutch wanted to develop the area and turn Mauritius into a staging post on their way to East and Southeast Asia.¹⁸ The eastern coastline of Madagascar is too flat, and there are few high-quality harbors for ships to dock, but because of its closer proximity to Mauritius, it has become a base for supplying rice and beef to Mauritius. From the mid-eighteenth century, French colonists began to grow sugar cane in Mauritius and Reunion, which in turn increased the demand for slaves. In the early nineteenth century, with France losing Saint Dominica in the Caribbean, the southern Indian Ocean became more prominent for France in sugar production, and the slave trade activities from Madagascar to the Mascarene Islands also peaked at that time.¹⁹

Looking at the slave trade among the Indian Ocean as a whole, France ranks first among European countries in terms of slave trade volume (see Table 2). However, the total number of slaves traded by France in the Indian Ocean is much less than that in the Atlantic (see Table 3), and Madagascar’s share in this trade was even smaller.

Table 2 The number of slaves traded by European countries among the Indian OceanFootnote

Abdul Sheriff, Vijayalakshmi Teelock et al., Transition from Slavery in Zanzibar and Mauritius: A Comparative History, Dakar: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2016, p. 26.

Table 3 Number of slaves imported into French North America and the CaribbeanFootnote

Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade, a Census, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969, p. 84.

It is estimated that from 1729 to 1820, the total number of slaves trafficked from Madagascar was about 67,000 (see Table 4). At the peak around 1800, about 2,000 Malagasy slaves were exported each year through the eastern port of Tamatave.²² Therefore, compared with the transatlantic slave trade, the trade volume in Madagascar is small. In addition, considering that Madagascar had a population of about 1.5 million in the early nineteenth century,²³ the proportion of people who were sold as slaves was actually much lower than that of West Africa. Since it is estimated that the total population of Africa in 1800 was about 70 million,²⁴ including that of the East Africa, North Africa, and Indian Ocean islands. As only the coastal and hinterland of West Africa and central Africa had a close relationship with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, it can be inferred that in these regions, the percentage of local population converted into slaves was higher than that of Madagascar.

Table 4 Estimates of slave exports from Madagascar in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesFootnote

Pier M. Larson, History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar (1770–1822), Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, Oxford: James Currey, 2000, p. 134.

As far as the slave supply area in Madagascar is concerned, the central plateau within the sphere of influence of Imerina is the area which provides the largest number of slaves.²⁶ It is estimated that at the peak of the slave trade, the number of slaves from Madagascar to overseas was around 1,500–1,800 per year.²⁷ As mentioned above, Madagascar exported about 2,000 slaves every year during the peak period of the slave trade, so that it can be inferred how overwhelmingly Imerina dominated the slave trade in Madagascar at that time. Initially, Imerina had to go through one or two intermediaries, most of which were tribes lived between the Central Plateau and the eastern coast, when selling slaves to the Europeans around the coastal area. Later, with the rise and expansion of the Merina,²⁸ the founders of Imerina, monopolized the slave trade and started to trade directly with Europeans. By the end of the eighteenth century, Tananarive had become the most important slave market in Madagascar at the time. At the same time, due to the rise of the Imerina, the port of Tamatave gained its trade status because of its closest distance to Tananarive, replacing the original western and northern trading ports and becoming the most important slave outport in Madagascar.²⁹

After briefly introducing the situation of the slave trade in Madagascar in modern times and comparing it with the African Atlantic region, two explicit characteristics of slave trade in Madagascar could be summarized: first, the volume of the slave trade is small; second, the political and economic center formed in the slave trade is located in the central plateau, the inland region.

3 How Did the Slave Trade, a Destructive Commercial Activity, Shape Madagascar’s New Regime

As can be seen from the above, it is argued that in the modern slave trade of Madagascar, the central plateau was the region that exported the most slaves, and the Imerina kingdom which was founded here, expanded exactly by means of the slave trade. However, it is well known that the slave trade as a whole is a process that causes population loss and exacerbates social tensions. How did this process, then, help with the formation of such a strong local kingdom in Madagascar?

When discussing the mechanism of the rise and development of local power in pre-colonial West Africa, Basil Davidson proposed the following three reasons³⁰:

• 1. Economic resource endowment: when a social group discovers and develops a high-value resource within its area, it can turn this resource into its own ability to defend and expand, and thus outcompeting rival groups. Ashanti, for example, with gold mines being discovered, armed and developed itself by selling gold and eventually became a local power.

• 2. Military reasons: after controlling trade routes by military means, communal groups located at the strategic economic and trade hubs could turn their geographical advantages into incentives for development. For example, the Oyo Empire, established by the North Yoruba, relied on its geographical advantage as a trade channel between the Hausa people in the North and the Yoruba people in the South. As a result, it actively expanded its arms through trade and eventually developed into a regional hegemony.

• 3. Political reasons: some communal groups, with neither economic resources endowments nor geographical advantages, would make efforts to promote their aggressive political ideas in an attempt to turn the population into fighting power and thus convert the disadvantages into advantages. At last, they may achieve development and expansion. For example, after suffering from the intrusion of the Oyo Empire and the small coastal states of Dahomey, the Fons in the north of Dahomey decided to participate in the competition for coastal trading rights and eventually won a dominant position in trade with European merchants.

After examining the above three reasons described by Davidson, it is evident that they are consistent in internal logic: all of them emphasize the maximization of their own returns in commodity trade and the conversion of these returns into expansion capabilities to ultimately confirm and consolidate hegemony. The difference among the three reasons is more reflected in the different media and strategies adopted while obtaining returns in trade.

This paper argues that, as far as Madagascar is concerned, the rapid development and growth of the Imerina Kingdom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to a large extent, followed such development mechanism of “transforming trade returns into ruling power”, yet showed its own distinctive characteristics at the same time. In this paper, two reasons for the development and growth of the Imerina kingdom are as follows:

• 1. Wealth and power accumulation in trade. First of all, being the core node of intra-island trade, Imerina has an inherent geographical advantage. Secondly, in terms of overseas trade, Imerina had formulated an appropriate economic and trade strategy based on its location and became the largest slave trade exporter in Madagascar at that time.

• 2. A new ruling order formed on the basis of integrating the power accumulated in trade through cultural means. Imerina made good use of the cultural identity strategy represented by the Hasina in its expansion and conquest of the slaves, and used the social crisis and ethnic conflict in the slave trade to attract acculturation of other ethnic groups. At the same time, it created divisions in cultural cultivation, and ultimately strengthened itself while weakening dissidents.

Next, the above two points will be elaborated one by one:

• 1. Wealth and power accumulation in trade

It is necessary to introduce the geographical features of Madagascar in advance. Madagascar is separated from the coast of Mozambique, its closest country on the African continent, by more than 300 km of ocean. In addition, Mozambique Channel, due to the complex ocean currents, has made navigation activities very dangerous for a long historical period. All of these formed great closure to the island of Madagascar, which greatly reduces the possibility of its communication with the outside world. Secondly, Madagascar covers a huge area of more than 580,000 km², and there are many mountains and plateaus on the island. The entire central part of the island is covered by mountains for more than 1,000 km from north to south. Thus, Madagascar is divided into discrete sub-regions by mountain ridges, rivers, dense forests, etc. Moreover, Madagascar is characterized by floods and mudslides during the rainy season which usually lasts for several months every year, during which typhoons may also strike. This will cause poor traffic among various areas of the island. Therefore, before the arrival of the European colonists, the island had long been sparsely populated and had a low level of communication among different ethnic groups.

The isolation allows different populations to develop different production modes and produce products with regional differences in combination with their living environment and natural resources. As communication between the various groups within the island increased, commercial networks of exchange gradually came into being. In this network, the central plateau, where the Merinas lived, became the heart of Madagascar’s intra-island trade because it was at the crossroads of commercial routes and was connected by roads in all directions of the island. In addition, the Merinas are famous for producing cotton and iron wares that are most popular in the island’s internal trade. The combination of its location and the production of key commodities made the region of Imerina a hub of trade within Madagascar ever since the mid-seventeenth century.³¹

In addition to being geographically central to the island, the topography of the Imerina is also an advantage. Compared with other areas in the central mountainous area, Imerina is relatively flat and has a slight elevation difference from the surrounding areas. This unique topographic advantage not only gives it better logistics accessibility, but also brings huge agricultural potential and population storage capacity with an annual abundant seasonal precipitation. Later, when Madagascar gained independence, the region of Antananarivo helped feed nearly a quarter of the country’s population with only one-tenth of the entire island.³²

However, it should be emphasized that although the Imerina has been the center of Madagascar’s trading network since the mid-seventeenth century, this area was less developed than the coastal areas until the end of the eighteenth century.³³ According to existing research, Imerina was still a small country with an area of only a few tens of square kilometers at the beginning of the eighteenth century.³⁴ Even in the middle of the century, its power still remained limited around Antananarivo. By contrast, the kingdom of Sakalava, which was located in the western coastal area, at that time occupied nearly one-third of Madagascar’s land before the rise of the Imerina dynasty due to its long-term trade relations with the East African coast and the Islamic world in the Middle East. Similarly, on Madagascar’s eastern coast, where European piracy roamed the sea, local communities had long traded with pirates and intermarried with them to equip themselves. In the early eighteenth century, Ratsimilaho, the son of a British pirate and a local woman, united the entire eastern coast of Madagascar and established the Betsimirazaka Federation,³⁵ which became the most powerful regime in eastern Madagascar then.

The two examples above show the competition faced by the emerging Imerina Kingdom, and the possible impact of trade with the outside world on the development of various regions of Madagascar. Making full use of foreign trade also contributed to the rise of the Imerina kingdom.

From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, Plantations on Mascarene Islands grew rapidly. Madagascar’s human and food resources are of great importance because growing cash crops such as sugar and coffee require a large labor force as well as the necessary sustenance to them. In terms of human resources, slave trade is an efficient way to meet labor needs. The Merinas of the Imerina region happened to be the largest exporter of slaves in Madagascar’s slave trade.³⁶ Naturally, during this period, Imerina was the kingdom that benefited most from the trade.

As mentioned above, during the peak period of slave trade, the number of slaves exported by the Kingdom of Imerina from Madagascar was about 1,500–1,800 each year, accounting for the vast majority of Madagascar’s annual slave exports at that time. In addition to replenishing its volume of slaves by acquiring prisoners of war, the Kingdom of Imerina also bought slaves from ethnic groups on Madagascar’s western coast and even from Arab traders, and later sold them to the French on the eastern coast. The silver currency gained was then used to continue their purchases of slaves along the western coast.³⁷ In other words, the Kingdom of Imerina was both the leading supplier as well as an intermediary agency of slave exports in the trans-regional trade. This dual status gave Imerina a much more significant commercial position than other kingdoms on the island, and a huge advantage in the accumulation of wealth.

The Imerina Kingdom, taking a large portion of its profits from the slave trade, used its dominant status to arm itself with muskets. Existing studies show that the slave-for-musket model was an important business model favored by both buyers and sellers in the slave trade in Africa and Madagascar. Musket is an epoch-making hot weapon, representing a generational difference between European and African weapon technology at that time. The slave-for-musket model can thus greatly enhance the strength of the African participants, help them rob more slaves and eventually enter into the cycle of “slave trade for profits—buying muskets for expansion—acquiring more slaves”. Therefore, after the slave trade began, European countries exported a vast number of muskets and supporting materials such as flint and gunpowder to Africa. At the peak of the slave trade in the eighteenth century, the arsenals in Birmingham alone shipped over 100,000 muskets annually to Africa.³⁸ From Senegal to Angola, many groups on the Atlantic coast of Africa traded muskets with Europeans; the volume of trade was much greater than it had been before the slave trade began.³⁹ In the early eighteenth century, the King of Dahomey sent a letter to George I of England, expressing his intention to replace all the old weapons in the kingdom with muskets. Later, Dahomey indeed successfully repelled the Oyo cavalry from the north with muskets.⁴⁰

Similarly, the import of muskets to Madagascar increased with the development of the slave trade. In the 1760s, an average of 3000 muskets from France arrived on the eastern coast of Madagascar every year.⁴¹ In 1769, the total import of muskets to Madagascar reached about 10,000.⁴² As the island’s leading slave trader, the Kingdom of Imerina was well aware of the importance of firearms. It is said that from the end of the sixteenth century, the early Kings of Imerina began to fight with firearms. In the late eighteenth century, Andrianampoinimerina, the most important founder of the Imerina Kingdom, regarded firearms as the priority commodities in slave trade, and obtained a large number of firearms by virtue of his monopoly position in the slave trade in Madagascar. Andria Nampoinimerina’s successor, Radama I, also vigorously sought to arm his troops through the slave trade. Even when negotiating the terms of the abolition of slavery with Britain in 1817, the main items he demanded in return were 100 flintlocks, 10,000 arquebuses, 10,000 pounds of gunpowder, and several other military supplies per year.⁴³

To sum up, with a high status in the trade network and its dominance over the slave trade, the kingdom of Imerina successfully transformed the gains from trade into national strength.

• 2. Integration of foreign trade mechanism and local culture

There are two preconditions for material accumulation in the development and expansion of Imerina. One is its commercial geographical location and the other is its ability to dominate both domestic and international markets in the slave trade. These two reasons, however, fail to answer a key question in the rise of the kingdom—the slave trade as a whole was harmful and even destructive to the local Madagascar society, how did Imerina then successfully develop into a powerful kingdom that almost unified Madagascar in such a destructive force?

Undoubtedly, the slave trade had brought great impact and harm to Madagascar. First, activities such as war, usury control, abduction and looting were the primary means of acquiring slaves. People are being grabbed by violence or deception in any way mentioned above.⁴⁴ The loss of population caused by the slave trade, coupled with the fact that youths and children were the main targets of the slave trade, further exacerbated the shortage of labor, which severely affected the livelihood and productivity of the areas affected by the slave trade.

In addition to the loss of population, the slave trade also destroyed human relationships, led to a sharp decline in social trust, and threatened the security of the public’s daily life. It is universally acknowledged that traveling alone and staying outdoors at night meant putting oneself in danger in Madagascar at the time. To obtain slaves, there were many scams for human capture and trafficking. For example, some old women would invite a passer-by to come in for a cup of water, and when the passer-by comes in, her confederates, who had been hidden in advance, would capture him and sell him as a slave. Others would make traps on the ground and place precious items like salt in the traps to lure others into them.⁴⁵ “I will send you to Tamatave” became the worst curse among the people of the central plateau for the reason that Tamatave, a port on the eastern coast, was the most important export port for slaves at that time.⁴⁶ A hill, located on the trade road between the central plateau of Imerina and the Tamatave coast, is known as the “Land of Weeping”. It was here that chained slaves saw the Indian Ocean for the first time and looked back to their homeland for the last time.⁴⁷ Ironically, when the Europeans, who advertised themselves as representatives of civilized people, first reached the coast of Madagascar, they tried their best to persuade the locals to sell slaves to them and allow them to carry out overseas human trafficking. However, the locals initially refused this demand since they considered human trafficking as intuitively unethical. It was only after various attempts that white Europeans finally got local people involved in the slave trade.⁴⁸

It is thought-provoking, however, that while the slave trade was a destructive business practice for local societies by and large, this destructive capacity contributed to the growth of certain leaders and regimes. People who can no longer trust their daily social relationships rely on powerful leaders to secure their life and production. This kind of attachment is not only an economic one, but also concerned with cultural identity. Larson points out that the reason that Andrianampoinimerina and Radama I were able to achieve unprecedented power in Madagascar was closely related to the cultural identity strategies they had applied in the slave trade.⁴⁹

In other words, the rise of local regimes in the slave trade is not merely a continuous process of accumulation of material, by converting slaves into wealth and military force, expanding the volume of slave trade through force, and further accumulating wealth and force. There is no denying that such accumulation is crucial, but the approach by which regime’s rise depends largely on culture and identity.

Taking the musket trade, which was closely related to the slave trade, as an example, the above article has demonstrated how Imerina people obtained the supply of muskets through slave trade and explained that they attached great importance to the role of muskets in maintaining royal power. Like local regimes in other parts of Africa, muskets represent the advantage in military power and capabilities in conquest. It seems that Imerina’s conversion of trade advantage into military advantage through the musket should be a natural process. Yet, this slave-for-musket logic can hardly explain the following paradox. In the slave-for-musket trade, Imerina on one hand faced competition from other groups and kingdoms along the coast of Madagascar; on the other hand, the Imerina had no geographic advantage in trade with Europeans as a landlocked kingdom. Then why was it able to come from behind and defeat the coastal tribes and gain the initiative in the slave trade? Similarly, in West Africa, there were many groups engaged in the slave-musket trade with Europeans, but why did some of them flourish while others did not? The Ashanti kingdom of Kumasi, for example, was also a landlocked power in its early days, but eventually managed to defeat the Fonti settled at the coastal region. The similarities between the trajectory of Ashanti and that of Imerina cannot be explained simply by the increased fighting capacity brought by the musket.

Richard J. Reid believes that it is oversimplified logic to explain the political and military expansion of African local governments in the period of slave trade with the concept of “slave-musket” accumulation. Competition for identity and resources among local populations is also crucial, and they may well coordinate foreign forces and combating mechanisms with local competition mechanisms.⁵⁰ In other words, the number of muskets a group acquired during the slave trade was not simply linearly related to its subsequent political and military development and territorial expansion.

Taking Madagascar as an example, according to existing research, most of the muskets shipped from Europe to the island in the early slave trade were purchased and consumed in its eastern coastal areas, and only a small part would flow into the central Imerina region at very high prices.⁵¹ The influence of foreign slave traders and pirates on Madagascar’s eastern coast led to heavy use of the musket in fight, whether it was during the unification of the Bechmizaraka alliance by Lazimirao or when the tribes of the alliance fought against each other after his death. That is to say, there were other groups in Madagascar that were ahead of the Imerinas in terms of the accessibility to and use of advanced musket. If the escalation of force brought about by the musket is decisive, then the coastal groups were more likely to expand and conquer the inland groups.

It is also worth noting that the casualty rate caused by musket war among Malagasy natives is only 2%, while casualty rate caused by hot weapon is 35–50% in Europe during the same period.⁵² The difference in this figure shows that the use and lethality of muskets by indigenous groups during the African slave trade was very different from that in Europe. There are several reasons for this. First, the muskets imported into Africa during the slave trade were mostly European arquebuses, which had been phased out, rather than flintlocks, because the former were cheaper than the latter both in price and the cost of maintenance. However, it is hard to operate the arquebuss which could be highly dangerous. The weapon has a high scrap rate and is easily affected by weather. The rain before and during the battle may well have a devastating blow to its combating capability. Furthermore, the slave trade demanded the health and integrity of the commodities. Therefore, fighting for the purpose of obtaining slaves needs to balance the lethality and deterrence, in order to win with the least loss.

So, the effectiveness of muskets in Africa is limited by a number of factors, including whether a community has a sufficiently developed craft industry to repair or even produce similar weapon by imitation; whether the military leaders can make the best use of their musket strengths and avoid their weaknesses wisely; whether the occasional weather factor is favorable during combat, etc. Therefore, although the large-scale introduction of muskets has significantly improved the military capabilities of local African populations as a whole, the number of weapons owned by an ethnic group in the short term cannot guarantee its long-term military victory and political development. Furthermore, the business model of the slave trade, in which the main objective was to obtain the intact bodies for labor, also determined that the use of weapons in related conflicts and competitions was unique.

Compared with the accumulation of muskets, it is more important to grasp the role of culture-related factors in order to understand the mechanism by which King Imerina gained the initiative to trade slaves. Imerina’s best use of cultural elements is embodied in its Hasina system, which, put it simply, means “sacred stream blessed by the ancestors”.⁵³ It’s a belief that originated in Madagascar whose divinity is derived from the seers and flows in this world from high to low and from the center outwards through a hierarchy of identities. In Hasina the king was supreme, followed by the nobles and then the freemen. In the sequential flow of Hasina, political power reflects the corresponding position in the flow system. The higher the political power is, the more important it is in the flow system. The status of a king is the divinity bestowed by the ancestors to the leader with the highest political power in the world, and the recognition of this divine status.⁵⁴ Correspondingly, since the king occupies the highest position in the flow of Hasina, the Hasina that he retains in his body and in his belongings is of the highest level, while those of the ministers and commons are of the lower level. On this basis, the king can grant high-level of Hasina to his ministers and people through speech, sight, amulets and other forms; and in return, the latter ones have to hand over a portion of their lower Hasina to their king through tribute of wealth, income, etc. When the lower level of Hasina is accumulated on the king, the increase of the king’s overall wealth is considered as a further reflection of the protection and blessing of the ancestral soul, and the commons will also feel the glory of contributing Hasina to the king. The society is thus bound together in this sequential flow, forming a highly ordered and symbiotic whole.

The key to maintain the Hasina system lies in the exchange between the higher and lower Hasina. The higher Hasina of the king is often delivered in the form of blessings, relying on symbolic representation such as symbols, while the lower Hasina is often transferred upward in the form of physical objects and wealth. British missionaries in the early nineteenth century described the low-level Hasina tribute as follows: on all important public events, whether it is festivals, circumcision, or the return of the king’s expedition, etc., all ministers and commons should pay tribute to the king. Although Hasina offered by individuals tended to be small, their sum could be considerable. Besides, all, including foreigners, who visit the capital of the kingdom were required to offer Hasina to the king as a token of their recognition of the royal authority.⁵⁵ In addition to the above-mentioned festive and occasional tributes, Hasina is also presented in the form of taxes such as tithing. Moreover, one-fifth of the profits of all items sold in the public market were to be turned over, so as one-fifth of the value of each slave, which was also required to be presented to the king as Hasina.⁵⁶ In return, the king’s higher level of Hasina descends, by symbolic means, on every village and even every minister and common in the realm. For example, in villages ruled by Imerina, amulets given by the king which bears the high order of Hasina were worshipped in squares or special places (see Fig. 1).⁵⁷ There was even a rule in Madagascar that if a prisoner could be caught in the eye of the king, he could be immediately exonerated.⁵⁸

Fig. 1

Amulet bearing King’s Hasina during the Imerina period.Footnote

William Ellis, History of Madagascar Vol 2, London: Fisher Son & Co, 1838, p. 477.

(Image source William Ellis (1838))

This Hasina’s exchange method links the whole society into a hierarchical one, and finds a divine explanation for the unequal distribution of material wealth. However, it is worth noting that in Madagascar before the arrival of the slave trade, the high-level Hasina was basically purely spiritual, and the lower-level Hasina was purely physical. But in the slave trade, the King of Imerina, Andrianampoinimerina, made an innovation and added real objects to the high-order Hasina. More importantly, compared to his competitors, Andrianampoinimerina also included slaves and muskets in the category of low-level physical Hasina that could be paid tribute. Today, this seems to be a natural process, but for the local society with strong traditional power at that time, it took courage and creativity to add new things to the existing cultural system, especially for “objects” such as slaves. As mentioned above, human trafficking in earlier Madagascar was contrary to the “goodness” of the local people’s intuition, while such “objects” could enter the Hasina system in the Imerina Dynasty, which shows that there is a historical social transformation and construction.

After combining the new trade goods with the local cultural operation mechanism, the King of Imerina could buy a slave with three Spanish silver dollars, and the same slave on the east coast of Madagascar could be worth sixty Spanish silver dollars or two muskets. This part of the price difference is the blessing given to the seller as the king, the high-ranking Hasina.⁶⁰ In addition, the king required that his allies and subordinates must purchase weapons from their designated suppliers, otherwise they would not be blessed by the high-rank Hasina. It is estimated that about two-thirds of his slaves were bought at prices well below market prices during the reign of Andrianampoinimerina.⁶¹

Of particular importance in the above-mentioned unequal trade of slaves and firearms by the king is the role of the Spanish silver dollar as a medium of exchange. When Madagascar was first discovered by European navigators, the latter found that the local residents did not care about silver, and they preferred tin.⁶² But with the deepening of the slave trade, the silver dollar became the common currency of the island, and it also became the Hasina recognized by the king.⁶³ As a currency-like medium of exchange, silver dollars have many advantages such as easy division, storage and counting. It facilitated the circulation of commodities and, of course, the accumulation of wealth by the kings who were dominant in this network. This also fully reflects how the foreign transaction mechanism is integrated with the local culture so that the monetization of Hasina has become a means of local creation and maintenance of a new political order.

In addition to the above commodity circulation areas, the King of Imerina also extended the use of Hasina to the military level. For example, the king would distribute talismans to Imerina soldiers, promising them greater honor and a better Hasina if they fought valiantly; on the contrary, if they behaved cowardly, their families would become slaves. In addition, if the battle was won, two-thirds of the booty other than the prisoners of war would belong to the king, and two-thirds of the prisoners of war would also be sold to the king at the special price of three silver dollars per slave introduced above.⁶⁴

However, it should be noted that the hierarchical nature of the unequal exchange in the Hasina cultural system is only one of its characteristics. Another important feature of the system is that the premise of its existence is that the society as a whole is harmonious and united in the hierarchical order. In other words, the lower classes of society can willingly accept today’s seemingly unequal forms of exchange out of believing in and maintaining the goodness of the whole group stemming from the will of ancestors and gods. Correspondingly, in order to maintain this overall harmony, the upper class of Imerina also takes into account the interests of the entire group. The kings and nobles of the upper echelons of Imerina often reflect this way of thinking in their actions: for example, during the autumn harvest in 1785, a locust plague suddenly struck during an internal war of the Merina tribe, and the warring parties referring to about sixteen thousand soldiers stopped hostilities at this time and turned to drive the locusts together. When asked why this was done, the leader of one of the parties said that the locust plague was about the interests of the whole, and the battle was only about the winning or losing of a small group.⁶⁵ In addition to this impressive story, another aspect reflects the overall concept of the Hasina system: once the original foreigners surrendered to Imerina, they would be quickly accepted and cultivated into Imerina’s Hasina system. They gained the possibility of paying the king’s sanctuary by paying tribute to Hasina, thereby reducing the risk of becoming a slave due to defeat. As Larson argues, Madagascar before the beginning of the nineteenth century was a process of breaking down existing structures and rebuilding new ones.⁶⁶ The Imerina dynasty not only gave priority to increasing its territory during its expansion and conquest, but also did not deliberately emphasize the distinction between the enemy and the enemy. Instead, it used the Hasina system and its own strength to continuously instill the people who were newly surrendered and surrendered to the royal court of Imerina’s “central position” and their subordination relative to the central. This “central-local subordination” positional relationship is both geographical and psychological, and is a new world outlook and cultural model.⁶⁷

In addition, some attributes of the Hasina system reveal that as a cultural mechanism, it is deeply influenced by the geographical environment. As an orderly flowing energy, Hasina needs a spatial representation to provide an empirical material and support for its construction. The terrain of the Tananarive region where the Kingdom of Imerina is located has the required conditions. Jean-Pierre Raison summarized it up well: firstly, the mountains here are considered to be close to the sun, where there is an intermediary between heaven and earth; secondly, on the mountains one can often find spring water, the flow of water that follows the trend provides an appropriate metaphor for the sequential flow of Hasina; moreover, there is a good sense of orientation and a clear view on the top of the mountain. Merina once believed that Tananarive was holy, and within the horizon of the mountain was a place of light, while beyond it an unknown area under the shade of trees.⁶⁸ Lars Vig, a pastor who preached in the central highlands of Madagascar in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, also introduced the local people’s worship of heights: many sacred cemeteries were on the top of the mountain; when someone felt that their strength was not as good as in the past, they would go to the top of the mountain to present sacrifices; after the spread of Christianity, there were also local pastors who believed that the top of the mountain was closer to God than the plain when preaching to the believers.⁶⁹ Yvette Sylla also pointed out that both mountains and waters can serve as the carrier of Hasina by being endowed with sanctity.⁷⁰ The hierarchy reflected by the height difference is not only reflected in the altitude difference between the mountains and the plains. In the bedroom of King Imerina, the king would receive his wife and subordinates on a high bed to reflect the excellence of his status (See Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Restoration of the structure of the palace of King Imerina.Footnote

Photographed by the author in Tananarive, 2018–07–05.

(Image source photographed by the author)

Since all human beings are born in a specific geographical space, it is a common situation in the primitive society of human beings to construct a concept of cosmology according to their own living environment, and this construction would also be naturally affected by their specific environment. With the expansion and complexity of human social organization, the application of such cosmology may also be extended and innovative due to stronger political needs. Un Imerina’s transformation from a local cultural system to a mechanism of identity cultivation in the slave trade, Hasina is a prime example of this. There is no doubt that Hasina’s distinct geographical characteristics can be seen from the above explanation of Hasina. It was conceived in the central plateau, where the strong topographical contrast between the hills and the surrounding plains was mediated by Hasina, which forms the projection of the geographical level on the maintenance and operation of the social hierarchical order.

To sum up, the operation mechanism of the Hasina system has important implications for understanding the rise of the kingdom of Imerina as a whole. Combined with the previous introduction to Hasina, it can be found that the cultural characteristic of Imerina lies in the unity of social hierarchy and social harmony as a whole. Kings and nobles are very much aware of the good interdependence between their own power and society as a whole. On one hand, they use the slave trade, the musket and cloth trade to exchange energy with the outside world to actively attack and conquer, and strengthen their capabilities as the core of the new order; on the other hand, they build an unequal but stable society with overall security and prosperity in the process of expanding their territories. This model has strong appeal and organizational advantages in the specific era of the slave trade. It allows for continous expansion, the seeking and maintaining power, and the provision of overall protection to its own people. The Imerina Kingdom relies on such a mechanism to quickly find a way to establish its own political order in a chaotic era. And because this order maximizes the safety of its identities, more and more other tribes are willing to participate. At the same time, the feature of Imerina relying on the combination of culture and trade to expand can also well explain why the Madagascar slave trade can promote the rapid development of the local regime while being small in size from the perspective of the island. It can be concluded that a strong cultural system contributed to this. It takes advantage of the sense of crisis brought about by social unrest and moral decline and emphasizes that naturalization, obedience and identification of foreigners can avoid the fate of becoming slaves, and thus quickly absorbs a large number of foreigners seeking a sense of security to become their own clansmen. At the same time, after absorbing the new group into its own cultural system, the Imerina ruling class in the highest position in this system can continue to use the unequal Hasina exchange to transform its cultural identity advantage into material advantage, and then further show the superiority of its own culture through material wealth and accelerate the adsorption process.

4 The Slave Trade and the Formation of Human Geographic Patterns: A Comparison Between Madagascar and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Madagascar is located in the southwest of the Indian Ocean, facing the African continent across the Mozambique Strait. It is the fourth largest island in the world and the largest in Africa, with the longest coastline in Africa totaling 4,800 km. However, it exhibits a unique pattern in its human geography that defies common sense for an island country. Notablely, despite being a large island country with the longest coastline in Africa, Madagascar has so far not developed any large-scale coastal cities (See Table 5).

Table 5 Proportion of the population of the largest coastal cities in the main coastal countries of sub-Saharan Africa in the total national population (2018)Footnote

The author is based on the statistics of the World Bank in 2018, source website: The World Bank, “Population, Sub-Saharan Africa”, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=ZG, 2020–05–25; The World Bank, “Population, Sub-Saharan Africa”, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.URB.LCTY?locations=ZG, 2020–05–25; the following data exceptions are: Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Kenya, South Africa, Madagascar Population data for largest coastal city from City Population, Thomas Brinkhoff, City Population, https://www.citypopulation.de, 2020–05–25.

From the comparison in Table 5, it can be found that in most sub-Saharan African countries, the population of the largest coastal cities exceeds 10% of the total population of the country, while the proportion in Madagascar is only slightly more than 1%. (See Table 5) The largest coastal city in Madagascar, Tamatave, had a population of only 320,000 in 2019, compared with a total population of 25.7 million.⁷³ In addition to demographic indicators, the coastal cities of Madagascar are also very small in terms of economic size and acreage. Taking the number of standard containers handled annually, an important indicator for measuring how big and busy a port is, as an example, the total number of standard containers handled in Madagascar in 2018 was only slightly more than 170,000, compared with more than 330,000 in Benin, a small West African country. There are more than 400,000 in Cameroon; among countries in the Indian Ocean region of East Africa, there are more than 450,000 in Mauritius, 1.3 million in Kenya, and nearly 4.9 million in South Africa.⁷⁴

From the perspective of human geography, the strange phenomenon that Madagascar has the longest coastline in Africa without large coastal cities is contrary to common sense. In people’s general impression, islands and coastal countries often have excellent shipping conditions, so they can have better foreign trade exchanges and economic development than landlocked countries. Adam Smith pointed out in his The Wealth of Nations that the economies of coastal areas tend to be better developed than inland areas, because coastal areas are directly connected to sea trade routes, which means that goods can flow and enter better market.⁷⁵

Yang Yongchun et al. also held that since European outsiders in sub-Saharan Africa first came from the ocean, the coastal areas of Africa naturally became the first space to be explored and developed by Europeans, which is also the general law of modern urban development in Africa. As a result, whether it is the opening and changing of waterways between Europe and Africa, or the locational relationship between Africa’s coastal areas and developed European regions, it will affect the development of African cities. In addition, since the output of cash crops and minerals needs to rely on the port to enter and exit, the corresponding colonial enterprises and management departments will also appear in the port city.⁷⁶ That is to say, the port is an important channel and access connecting the vast hinterland of Africa with the rest of the world, and it is a universal logic to develop port economy as a priority. In this regard, when summarizing the historical development law of port cities in West Africa, Zhen Feng et al. also pointed out that in the slave trade of Europeans for more than 300 years and the colonial activities in the following century, West African seaports emerged as a base for plundering wealth and a cargo transfer station.⁷⁷ In other words, the shift of the key economic zone to the coast brought about by the slave trade has spawned the rise of a large number of West African seaports, and the local regimes will accordingly shift the focus of political and military activities to the coastal areas.

According to this logic, during the slave trade period, Madagascar should also have witnessed the rapid rise of coastal cities and the transfer of political and economic centers to the coast, forming a human geography pattern dominated by coastal development. However, in fact, Madagascar’s national development path from the era of the slave trade is completely contrary to this common sense. Its capital, Tananarive, and its central plateau were at the center of the country and prospered in the slave trade with the growth of the Imerina dynasty. On the contrary, the coastal areas remained marginalized for a long time and the economic development was very limited. In 1828, shortly after the end of the slave trade, it was estimated that 750,000 of Madagascar’s total population of 2 million lived in the Imerina region, including 75,000 in the urban area of Tananarive, while the slave trade in Madagascar. The most important port, Tamatave, was still a small village.⁷⁸ In addition, the central plateau area at that time also concentrated the largest number of churches and markets in Madagascar. In addition, the first industrial area in Madagascar built by the French adventurer Jean Laborde in the early nineteenth century also came into being around Tananarive. All in all, Madagascar constitutes a counter-example relative to the African continent, and its existence shows that the slave trade activity did not everywhere lead to a shift in the political, economic and geographic center of gravity toward the coast.

In the following part this article will discuss how the slave trade affects the locational economic geography of a region by comparing Madagascar and the transatlantic slave trade region, and thereby answer why the slave trade in Madagascar did not promote the priority development of its coastal areas. In this regard, this article argues that the difference in the volume of the slave trade is one of the main reasons for the formation of different human-geographical patterns between the African continent and Madagascar in the process of slave trade. The reason for the huge difference in the volume of the slave trade in the two regions is mainly due to the different geographical factors of the two regions.

At the beginning of this article, the difference in volume between the Madagascar slave trade and the transatlantic slave trade has been introduced: first of all, in terms of total volume, the number of the transatlantic slave trade exceeds 11 million, while the slave output of Madagascar is less than 70 thousand. If factors such as wars, commodity exchanges, social interpersonal exchanges and others involved in the number of boardings are considered, then the difference in the extent of the impact of the slave trade between the relevant regions of the African continent and Madagascar may be even greater.

Secondly, in terms of the number of slaves in a single slave trading port, cities with huge flows of slaves appeared on the Atlantic coast of Africa. For example, Mariana Candido pointed out in her research that Benguela, Africa’s third largest slave trade port alone, saw more than 700 thousand black slaves board ships and leave during the transatlantic slave trade.⁷⁹ On the contrary, the annual output of slaves from Madagascar did not exceed 2 thousand at its peak, which is a very limited trade volume. According to the shipping load of slave ships at that time, this trade volume means that only five to ten slave ships would come to the coast of Madagascar every year to sell slaves, which means that there is less than one per month on average. Even if they all choose to dock in the same port, the size of this port is also very limited. In addition, Madagascar is far from the Atlantic region, and the market for slave exports is mainly the Mascarene Islands, but the market capacity and demand of both Mauritius and Reunion are minimal, and Madagascar also faces competition from other parts of East Africa in terms of slave supply.

Looking at the transatlantic slave trade, the considerable labor gap in the colonial activities of the Americas brought about strong demand for labor, which led to the largest forced immigration in human history. But two further questions need to be raised here: Why were Native Americans unable to meet the labor needs of the colonists? Why was it so difficult to develop Africa on a large scale in the first place?

The answer to the first question largely lies in the geographic level: South America’s huge labor gap is due to its long-term isolation and sparse population distribution, which makes its inhabitants far behind the rest of the world in evolving resistance to infectious diseases. And thus, European invaders devastated Native Americans with the smallpox virus they brought with them shortly after they embarked on the Americas. Scholars such as Jared Diamond have discussed this question extensively, pointing out that the smallpox virus caused massive death among native Americans. For example, about 95% of the indigenous people along Mississippi Valley died from smallpox virus shortly after their first contact with Europeans.⁸⁰ Additionally, the smallpox virus carried via European ships in 1517 caused the extinction of about one-third of the American Indian population; about 200,000 of the 6 million inhabitants of the Inca Empire died in 1524–1527.⁸¹ At the same time, the virus also killed the rulers of the Inca Empire and the Aztec Empire as well as many important members of the royal family, making the imperial ruling system almost collapse.⁸²

There are many explanations for the answer to the second question, but an important factor is also geographical—an important factor why Africa did not suffer from large-scale European colonization until the second half of the nineteenth century is the disease problems caused by geographical environment. While Europeans attempted to establish colonial sites in Africa in the early sixteenth and even late fifteenth centuries, their activities were limited to a few coastal areas long before the revolutionary achievements of modern medicine, such as the invention of antibiotics. It is difficult for them to penetrate deep into the interior on a large scale. Various diseases on the African continent, such as fever, dysentery, cholera, malaria, hepatitis, etc., were a deadly threat to Europeans during the slave trade. Even in the early nineteenth century, these diseases also caused about one-third of white settlers’ death each year.⁸³

In summary, the rich resources of plants, minerals and land in the Americas have brought huge development prospects and labor needs while the large-scale death of local indigenous people has created a labor vacuum that needs to be filled. At the same time, due to the harsh living environment and other reasons, it is difficult for Africa to directly develop on a large scale. As resource demand, the population here needs to seek new places and export markets. The combination of these factors constituted the main motivation for the large-scale slave trade of European colonists.⁸⁴

With the motive of the slave trade, the rapid advancement of European navigation technology from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century made transportation capacity of the transatlantic slave trade possible, which is also the direct guarantee that the transatlantic slave trade could reach a population of tens of millions. According to some studies, Columbus sailed across the Atlantic with a cargo capacity of only 165 tons, while the cargo capacity of British sailboats before the end of the slave trade had exceeded one thousand tons. In terms of ship speed, the highest speed of ancient Roman ships was no more than 2.5 m per second, while the speed of the clipper-type transport clippers widely used in the tea trade in the mid-nineteenth century could reach 9 m per second. According to figures cited by Vaclav Smil, Netherlands, nicknames as the “sea coachman”, in its seafaring heyday, was powered by sails for its development as much as all the windmills in the country combined. Although this estimate is very vague, the contribution of technological innovations in windsurfing to enhancing European maritime transport capabilities is undoubtedly enormous.⁸⁵ Thanks to what was mentioned above, in the middle and late stages of the slave trade, the loading capacity of slaves in each ship can generally exceed 400 people, and the largest single-ship slave shipment in the data records even reached 1,700 people.⁸⁶

The improvement of European shipping capacity is crucial to understanding the shift of Africa’s economic front to the coastal area. From the Ghana Empire a thousand years ago to the Songhai Empire in the early days of the Great Discovery, all the major cities of West Africa had concentrated in the inland Niger River Basin, especially the middle reaches of the Niger River for a long period. This kind of city distribution is determined by the location of gold production and the needs of the trans-Saharan trade, but the importance of gold in the trans-Saharan trade often overshadows the existence of other commodities, slaves being one of them. The trans-Saharan slave trade is related to the rise of the Arab Empire. Based on the data of existing research, about 3–5 million black slaves were transported from sub-Saharan to North Africa through the Saharan trade network in the nearly 1,000 years from the seventh century to the sixteenth century.⁸⁷ The last two centuries of these nearly thousand years were the peak of the Saharan slave trade, but the annual slave export was only about 5–10 thousand in amount.⁸⁸ By contrast, the transatlantic slave trade averaged more than 50,000 slaves per year at its peak from the early eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century for about 150 years, viz. about ten times the annual average of the trans-Saharan slave trade.⁸⁹ In terms of transportation media, the decline of the trans-Saharan trade route in West Africa and the prosperity of the maritime slave trade are a manifestation of the new type of sailing boat as a more efficient means of transportation to replace the inefficient camel caravan.

With the gradual prosperity of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a trade transport chain of “West African interior—West African coast— Atlantic—America” was formed, and the trade volume on this conveyor chain far exceeded the original “West African interior—The Sahara—North Africa” route, and the economic center of West Africa also began to shift from the middle Niger River to the Atlantic coast. The bifurcation of the Akan People’s trade routes brought about by the transatlantic slave trade is a vivid example of this shifting mechanism of economic activity. The Akan people who started to rise in gold production and trade in the fifteenth century initially mainly sold their commodities to the north. They either sold gold-based commodities north to Timbuktu or sought trade opportunities with the Hausa people in the northeast. But at any rate, these goods would eventually go to the Middle East and North Africa through the trans-Saharan trade network. With the arrival of Europeans and the rise of the slave trade, the trade routes of the Akan people began to diverge to the south,⁹⁰ leading to the trading castle strongholds established by the Europeans along the coast—this is obviously the new advantageous trade overcoming the old weak trade and thus changing transportation and urban location. At the same time, the main trade commodities of the Akan people also began to change from gold to slaves, and finally formed the Ashanti Kingdom with the help of slave trade.

In fact, the existence of the Saharan slave trade network itself shows that the slave trade, as an economic activity of human trafficking, does not necessarily lead to the transfer of the political and economic center of its export destination to the coast. The slave trade, which caused the shift of political and economic center to the coast, is a kind of slave trade under a special geographical environment and a special historical period. Therefore, the prefix “transatlantic” is particularly important. Its connotations include the great geographical discovery of the Americas, the mass death of the native Indian population, the rise of the emerging plantation economy in the colonies and the transformation of the European way of life behind it; it also includes the European Navigational innovations, African diseases, population reserves and slave-trafficking culture, etc. They worked together to form the transatlantic slave trade, and also brought about great changes in the human geography of the relevant regions.

It is precisely under the influence of this historical and geographically specific slave trade that many coastal cities and strongholds were formed along the Atlantic coast of Africa during this period. Since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Portugal and the Netherlands first established fortresses and ports such as Elmina, Luanda, Cape Verde, Goree Island, Cape Town, etc.; and then France and the United Kingdom followed one after another to compete with Portugal and the Netherlands, and established fortresses such as St. Louis and Lagos.⁹¹ According to statistics, during the slave trade period, more than 40 European trade fortresses emerged along the Gold Coast alone (see Fig. 5).⁹² They were numerous and large in scale, and would continue to dominate regional political and economic activities in the future. This is the law that a huge number of people and commodities will exemplify when there is a long-term sea-to-land transhipment demand in a certain area.⁹³ Correspondingly, it is precisely because of its special geographical location that Madagascar’s slave trade volume is small, the scale of the ports formed is also small and the coastal area has a small adsorption force for political and economic activities, which makes it difficult to promote changes in the original human geography pattern. Geography cannot be assumed, but if Madagascar were located in the tropical Atlantic, it would be believed that its human-geographical pattern would probably have evolved differently in the slave trade.

The influence of geographical factors on Madagascar and the transatlantic slave trade is also reflected in the differences in the topography of the two. There are many areas in the African continent that are most affected by the slave trade, and their terrain is relatively flat from the coast to the inland. For example, in West Africa, except for a few areas such as Fouta Djallon, Guinea Plateau and Jos Highlands, the rest of the area is mostly plain lowlands.⁹⁴ In today’s Benin, in the former kingdom of Dahomey, the cavalry from the Oyo country in the north can even march all the way to the coast.⁹⁵ In addition to the relatively flat terrain, the African continent has many rivers and waterways that go extensively into the interior, which greatly improves the accessibility of the hinterland of the corresponding region. As mentioned earlier, the Portuguese exploration started in Mozambique in 1512 and has penetrated into what is today’s Zimbabwe. Similarly, on the west coast of the African continent, Portugal explored its hinterland shortly after discovering the Congo River in 1482 and discovered the Kingdom of the Congo. Between 1618 and 1620 the British travelled up the Gambia, exploring more than 300 miles of the inland coast of the Gambia.⁹⁶ For Europeans, although geographical accessibility could not be immediately converted into convenience for colony construction due to disease, for locals, this geographical accessibility reduced the difficulty of commodity logistics, making it easier to transport slaves and other goods between the inland and the coast, which increased the size of the slave trade.

Compared with European continent, Madagascar is particularly difficult to be penetrated deep inland because of its topography and vegetation. Since there are mountains running through the entire central region, the rivers here usually have a large drop, and the average watershed distance from the Indian Ocean is only about 100 km,⁹⁷ with only a few navigable sections along the coast. Especially in the eastern region where the slave trade most frequently happened, although it is a windward slope with abundant rainfall and many rivers, due to the sharp rise in terrain which is often no longer navigable after entering the land for tens of kilometers. If one goes west by land from the east coast of Madagascar, especially around Tamatave, it will soon be difficult to pass because of the steep cliffs and dense vegetation. The rivers west of Madagascar also have very limited navigable mileage due to successive granite steps and excessive seasonal differences in water levels. Poor transportation conditions make it more difficult for trade logistics to move between the coast and the interior of Madagascar. According to statistics, until the end of the nineteenth century, the average annual freight volume between Tananarive and Tamatave was only 500–600 Tons.⁹⁸

In addition, another important reason for the small volume of foreign trade in Madagascar during the slave trade period was that there was no large-scale mining of high-value-added minerals (such as gold), and no easy-to-obtain luxury goods like ivory, thereby losing an essential incentive for foreigners to trade with locals. This reason can also be classified as a geographical factor, in sharp contrast with West Africa, South Africa, and East Africa: Ghana in West Africa today is called the “Gold Coast”, and the most important stronghold built by the Portuguese in Ghana, Elmina, literally means “Minerals”, Cote d’Ivoire means “Ivory Coast”. This naming method that combines ivory, minerals and coasts best demonstrates the impact of resources and trade on the human geography pattern. In addition to West Africa, South Africa has discovered many gold mines near Johannesburg, which has led to the development of Durban and Maputo. And on the trade routes connecting the coast and its hinterland in East Africa, ivory and slaves are equally important commodities, and thus have produced images like Tippu Tip, a legendary businessman from Zanzibar who mainly deals in inland trade in East Africa. It can be seen that commodities such as gold and ivory have participated in shaping the local political, economic and geographical location along with the maritime activities of Europeans in many parts of the African continent, but a similar mechanism in Madagascar did not appear in the pre-colonial period.

To sum up, given Madagascar’s geographical location and its geographical environment, if there is no large-scale and stable trade exchange with the outside world, the inland core structure dominated by the Kingdom of Imerina would tend to maintain the original human geography pattern. The Indian Ocean trade area from East Asia, Southeast Asia to South Asia, the Middle East and even East Africa has been a mature trade network since a long time, unlike the Americas on the other side of the Atlantic, which is an emerging production base and market,⁹⁹ and thus in the migration of goods and labor, there would not be a new creation system on the scale of the triangular trade in the Atlantic region. Madagascar, which is already on the edge of the Indian Ocean trade network, is difficult to export a large amount of foreign materials and personnel, and there would be no rapid development of coastal areas.

5 Five Conclusion

As an integral part of the modern African slave trade, the Madagascar slave trade has not been paid much attention by academic circles for a long time due to its small size. This article first discusses the relationship between the rise of the Imerina dynasty and the slave trade in Madagascar, demonstrating how the slave trade, typically a destructive force, was transformed into a medium for the establishment of a new system of power through the trading activities and cultural identity strategies of the Kingdom of Imerina. The rulers of the Imerina Kingdom creatively turned social crisis and ethnic conflicts into favorable conditions for their expansion by organically combining the Hasina cultural system with slave trade activities. This ultimately led to cultural inclusion and political and military conquest of other groups in Madagascar. Next, by comparing the inland human-geographical pattern formed during the Madagascar slave trade with the shift of the political and economic center of West Africa to the coast in the transatlantic slave trade, this article argues that the single slave trade alone is not the sole reason for the rise of African coastal areas. The rapid development of the coastal areas of the African continent due to the trans-Atlantic slave trade has its own historical and geographical particularities. After the Age of Exploration began, the integrated geographical, humanistic, economic, technological and other factors in the Americas, Africa and Europe jointly created a unique transatlantic slave trade. Its massive scale triggered the shift of Africa’s political and economic center from the interior to the coast. In contrast, the case of Madagascar illustrates another form of geographical location evolution resulting from the combination of slave trade activities with geographical and cultural factors. The influence of small-scale slave trade on the existing human geography of the island is subordinate, it served as a catalyst forming the Imerina Kingdom as an inland human geography space. However, it was influential enough to reshape the inland human-geographical pattern of Madagascar.