The Madagascar Youths: British Alliances and Military Expansion in the Indian Ocean Region by Gwyn Campbell

Abstract

In 1974, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, the prime minister of independent Mauritius, observed that in the wake of the decolonization of East Africa and South and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean was “no longer a European lake.”1 This defiant observation, which he couched in the spirit of Afro-Asian solidarity that sought to dismantle the political and economic binds that the British Empire had established across the ocean, has been echoed repeatedly throughout the historiography of the Indian Ocean World. For example, in The Indian Ocean in World History, Alpers notes that the consolidation of British power in India, particularly in the wake of the 1857 mutiny, effectively transformed the Indian Ocean from an “Islamic Sea” into a “British Lake.”2Campbell’s The Madagascar Youths is an engaging and rigorous study of the making of this “British Lake”—the rise of British economic and political hegemony—from the viewpoint of the southwest Indian Ocean. With a tight focus on Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands, the book revolves around the political relationship between Sir Robert Farquhar, the first governor of British Mauritius after the French ceding of the island, and King Radama I of the Imerina Kingdom of the central highlands of Madagascar. As part of the diplomatic rapprochement between the Imerina and the British, Radama and Farqhuar signed a treaty in 1820 that, among other things, allowed around 100 young Malagasy to travel throughout the British Empire in an effort to build closer ties between the two political entities. Readers learn that although the treaty between Radama and Farqhuar suggested a meeting of equals, it was always Farqhuar’s intention to use his governorship to transform Mauritius into a beachhead for British power in the Indian Ocean. Deeply researched and filled with extended excerpts of primary source material, the book follows the travels of these youth from the highlands of Madagascar to the streets of Port Louis and to the English countryside as British power grew.Campbell embeds the peregrinations of these youths within the political and economic circuits of a changing Indian Ocean: Some of the youths went to Mauritius and the United Kingdom to learn military discipline or naval strategy and others even to study music. More than a handful of them perished on their journeys; those who did return to Imerina often encountered a politically turbulent kingdom reckoning with British regional ascendancy. In fact, not long after the 1820 Imerina–British treaty was signed, Radama, recognizing the duplicity of British cultural diplomacy, began to restrict British penetration into Madagascar. Campbell explains, however, that Ranavalona I, Ramada’s successor, could not pursue autonomous economic modernization because the expertise that the “Madagascar Youth” had learned abroad was incongruous with fanompoana—a form of “obligatory service to the sovereign” that hindered the restructuring of labor necessary to drive industrial growth. The experience of the “youth,” however transformative for them, was not always well-received in Imerina.The Madagascar Youths adds to a body of work that disputes narratives of uncontested European political ascendancy in the southwest Indian Ocean by foregrounding the political work done by non-European actors. Although the book is a testament to Campbell’s research prowess and expansive knowledge, its analytical interventions are unstated, left for readers to deduce. In the opening chapter, “The Context,” Campbell suggests that the book’s contribution is purely additive. In his words, the story of the Madagascar youths is “an additional facet … that is almost completely absent from the historiography” (1).Regional specialists will surely see the place of this story within a historiography aimed at properly situating Madagascar within the field of Indian Ocean World studies. Curious readers from outside of this arena, however, may be left wondering about the book’s larger context. In addition to Larson’s work, which reconstructed the intellectual and cultural web of Madagascar and the Mascarenes, Hooper’s Feeding Globalization comes to mind as an example of work that explicitly aimed to place Madagascar “within an incipient world system” of “transoceanic trade networks.”3 The cosmopolitan experiences of the Madagascar youths, though lived after Hooper’s study, further illuminates the author’s conclusions. Such connections, however, are readers’ to make; Campbell does not venture into them.