At last, a general history of Madagascar crafted by professional historians trained as Africanists and writing for both a general audience and colleague historians. The authors make a superb team. Solofo Randrianja is one of Madagascar's most eminent, insightful, and prolific historians, trained at the Université de Paris VII. His many travels have taken him about the globe to archives and centers of research. At the same time, he has a profound personal understanding of Madagascar and its cultures, with an emphasis on political history in the twentieth century. That Randrianja's father was a political organizer who traveled widely in Madagascar in the middle years of the twentieth century and often brought his young son with him adds immeasurably to the texture and flavor of the narrative. Stephen Ellis is a Cambridge-trained historian of nineteenth-century Madagascar and a senior researcher at the African Studies Centre in Leiden. He brings his many years of broad research experience in Africa and specific knowledge of Madagascar to the project, together with a fresh understanding of much-underused Dutch-language sources and a keen knack for writing to a broad audience.
With its seven chapters and 232 pages (excluding endnotes), the result is splendid. Madagascar: A Short History is a page-turner. The narrative agilely maneuvers through 1600 years of Madagascar's human history, from early settlement in c. 500 ce to the rule of the recently deposed President Ravalomanana. Moreover, the narrative is chronologically balanced rather than heavy-loaded with the stuff of the twentieth century, as unfortunately seems rather the fashion in our profession these days. The first five chapters bring us up to 1895; the last two cover the French period and independence. The problem with previous general histories of Madagascar is that they were written either by amateur historians with superficial, eclectic knowledge of the Big Island (Mervyn Brown), by ex-colonial administrators bearing their inevitable prejudices and ignorance of the language (Hubert Deschamps), or by archaeologists who brought significant insight to ancient issues but had difficulty handling the last three centuries or adequately digesting the extant historical literature (Pierre Vérin). In Madagascar, two professional historians weave expert readings of the major secondary literature on Madagascar's history together with their own original findings to achieve an erudite and highly interpretive result engaging to experts of the island yet still easily accessible to the broadest of audiences. The narrative does not shy from taking positions on a number of contentious issues in Malagasy history (settlement, slavery, forced labor, and naming the nineteenth-century kingdom whose capital was at Antananarivo), and one would not expect it to. When the authors interpose their own interpretive stamp on difficult issues, their judgment tends to come not as bald assertion of fact (an all-too-frequent problem in Malagasy history) but as a reasoned maneuver stating both the evidence and bases for their judgments. You may not agree with them – and I don't always (see below) – but you will know their premises.
Colleagues in African history, this is the book you have been waiting for to bring you up to speed on Madagascar and its history, a topic so important and integrated into that of East Africa and the western Indian Ocean, yet so poorly covered in our professional training. Madagascar is your key reference, your source for lecturing, and a starting point for further explorations. Just follow the notes and the bibliography – the index can be quite helpful too. I assigned some chapters from the book as required reading for undergraduate students in a survey of early African history during late 2009; the historical narrative reads well even for that first level of discovery. It pulls students into the multifaceted world of the western Indian Ocean and to Madagascar's connections with Africa and Austronesia. In discussions, students were abuzz with excitement about Madagascar and an Austronesian element in East African history – a rare pleasure for me!
Randrianja and Ellis, I believe, successfully achieve a triple readership in their work (general interest, historians of Africa and the Indian Ocean, and experts on Madagascar). This is no small achievement, but it does permit the expert to engage the authors in friendly, collegial debate. An undertaking of this sort does not come without certain liabilities, none of which is of significant concern to most readers nor hampers the status of the work as an important general and introductory survey of Madagascar's human history. The existing historical literature on Madagascar is so voluminous that one could never expect any general history to cover all bases. The absence of certain important kingdoms and political formations in the narrative (Betsileo, Bara, Betanimena) is especially regrettable, though this follows, to a large extent, lacunae in recent historical research on the Big Island. Betsileo's past seems in general to have fallen into an undeserved neglect.
Another idiosyncrasy comes from discussion of Madagascar's external slave trades. While the authors briefly acknowledge that the largest of these was not European, all other discussion in the narrative focuses on European slave-trading. And, while the west coast of the island receives exceptional attention (a particular asset for the historian of Africa), the east is less thoroughly treated. This reverses a trend in previous general histories and might be seen as salutary. But the narrative would have benefited from a discussion of the centuries of cultural and commercial interaction between Europeans and islanders along the eastern coastal region, one that does not boil down only to slaving and that has important implications for modern Madagascar.
There are a few points in the discussion of the peopling of Madagascar where insufficient evidence seems proffered for assertions of significance – that ‘it is quite possible that the first visits to Madagascar were by Austronesians who had already established colonies in East Africa, intermarrying with Africans’ (p. 24) or the rather strongly asserted Javan or Sumatran origins of the Raondriana of south-east Madagascar. The fact is, we simply don't have the evidence to make such claims. These might have been the case, and they might not. Among interpretive choices, possibly the boldest is designating what is conventionally called ‘the Merina Kingdom’ as ‘the Kingdom of Madagascar’. The reasons for this choice are carefully laid out in the narrative (and hinge primarily on the international diplomatic recognition of the government at Antananarivo in the nineteenth century and its control of the most important ports) but that formulation leads to the appearance at several reprises of the government of Antananarivo's kingdom as ‘the government of Madagascar’, an odd formulation suggesting a nineteenth-century political unity of the Big Island that never actually was, and an expansion from the highlands that scarcely achieved hegemony.
None of these difficulties of choice eclipses the impressive breadth of synthesis that Madagascar: A Short History brings to the reader. This book is far and away the single best general history of Madagascar. Put it on your shelf, read it, study it, teach it.
