The history of Africa's historical relationship with the rest of the Indian Ocean world is one of a vibrant exchange that included commodities, people, flora and fauna, ideas, technologies and disease. This connection with the rest of the Indian Ocean world, a macro-region running from Eastern Africa, through the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia to East Asia, was also one heavily influenced by environmental factors. In presenting this rich and varied history, Gwyn Campbell argues that human-environment interaction, more than great men, state formation, or imperial expansion, was the central dynamic in the history of the Indian Ocean world (IOW). Environmental factors, notably the monsoon system of winds and currents, helped lay the basis for the emergence of a sophisticated and durable IOW 'global economy' around 1,500 years before the so-called European 'Voyages of Discovery'. Through his focus on human-environment interaction as the dynamic factor underpinning historical developments, Campbell radically challenges Eurocentric paradigms, and lays the foundations for a new interpretation of IOW history.

The first comprehensive economic history of pre-colonial Madagascar, this study examines the island's role from 1750 to 1895 in the context of a burgeoning international economy and the rise of modern European imperialism. This study reveals that the Merina of the Central Highlands attempted to found an island empire and through the exploitation of its human and natural resources build the economic and military might to challenge British and French pretensions in the region. Ultimately, the Merina failed due to imperial forced labour policies and natural disasters, the nefarious consequences of which (disease; depopulation; ethnic enmity) have in traditional histories been imputed external capitalist and French colonial policies.

This book reveals the hitherto hidden history of inter-missionary dispute that split the first LMS mission to Madagascar. Focussing on David Griffiths, whose pivotal role was concealed by the LMS, it suggests that Welsh-English rivalry moulded the mission’s destiny.

The abolition of slavery in and around the Western Indian Ocean have been little studied. This collection examines the meaning of slavery and its abolition in relation to specific indigenous societies and to Islam, a religion that embraced the entire region, and draws comparisons between similar developments in the Atlantic system. Case studies include South Africa, Mauritius, Madagascar, the Benadir Coast, Arabia, the Persian Gulf and India. This volume marks an important new development in the study of slavery and its abolition in general, and an original approach to the history of slavery in the Indian Ocean and Asia regions.

First published in 2004. This book - previously published as a special issue of the journal Slavery and Abolition - provides pioneering studies on the nature and structure of resistance to forms of bondage in Africa, Asia and the Indian Ocean world.

Explores the history of the 'Madagascar Youths', young people trained by the British, and their impact on Malagasy-British relations.

This book - previously published as a special issue of the journal Slavery and Abolition - provides pioneering studies on the nature and structure of resistance to forms of bondage in Africa, Asia and the Indian Ocean world.

Slavery, sex, and dehumanization / David Brion Davis -- Sexuality and slavery in the Western Sudan / Martin A. Klein -- Sex and power in the Russian institutions of slavery and serfdom / Richard Hellie -- Concubinage, law, and the family Suria: concubine or secondary slave wife? The case of Zanzibar in the nineteenth century / Abdul Sheriff -- A sexual order in the making: wives and slaves in early imperial China / Griet Vankeerberghen -- "To marry one's slave is as easy as eating a meal": the dynamics of carnal relations within Saharan slavery / E. Ann McDougall -- Slavery, family life, and the African diaspora in the Arabian Gulf, 1880-1940 / Matthew S. Hopper -- "I ask for divorce because my husband does not let me go back to my country of origin with my brother": gender, family, and the end of slavery in the region of Kayes, French Sudan, 1890-1920 / Marie Rodet -- The fatal sorbet: an account of slavery, jealousy, pregnancy, and murder in a harem in Alexandria, Egypt, ca. 1850 / George Michael La Rue -- Intimate power: sexuality and slavery in the households of the Atlantic world sexual relations between the enslaved and between slaves and nonslaves in nineteenth-century Cuba / Ulrike Schmieder -- "This complicated incest": children, sexuality, and sexual abuse during slavery and the apprenticeship period in the British Caribbean, 1790-1838 / Tara A. Inniss -- Strategies for social mobility: liaisons between foreign men and slave women in Benguela, ca. 1770-1850 / Mariana P. Candido -- Sex trafficking and prostitution: Japanese brothel prostitution, daily life, and the client: colonial Singapore, 1870-1940 / James Francis Warren -- Body-price: ambiguities in the sale of women at the end of the Qing Dynasty / Johanne Ransmeir -- Sex slavery and human trafficking in Nigeria; an overview / Roseline Uyanga with Marie-Luise Ermisch -- The realities and rise of female sex trafficking in Thailand and Cambodia in the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century / Francesca Ann Louise Mitchell -- The Japanese army and comfort women in World War II / Shigeru Sato -- Art, sexuality, and slavery: hidden geographies of the Cape: shifting representations of slavery and sexuality in South African art and fiction / Gabeba Baderoon -- Innocence curtailed: reading maternity and sexuality as labor in Canadian representations of Black girls / Charmaine Nelson -- Gender, sex, and power: images of enslaved women's bodies / Ana Lucia Araujo -- Queering the study of slavery: "To lever's on soap!": Roger Casement, slavery, and sexual imperialism / Brian Lewis -- Sodomy, love, and slavery in colonial Brazil: a case study of Minas Gerais during the eighteenth century / Ronoldo Vainfas -- Eunuchs, power, and slavery in the early Islamic world / Salah Trabelsi -- Legacies: discourse, dishonor, and labor: slaves, coolies, and garrison whores: a colonial discourse of "unfreedom" in the Dutch East Indies / Joost Coté -- Lure of the impure: sexuality, gender, and agency of "slave" girls in contemporary Madagascar / Sandra J.T.M. Evers -- Wages of womanhood: managers and women workers in the Jute Mill industry of Bengal, 1890-1940 / Subho Basu.

This book explores the life of Robert Lyall, surgeon, botanist, voyager, British Agent to the court of Madagascar. Born the year of the French Revolution, Lyall grew up in politically radical Paisley, Scotland, before studying medicine, in Edinburgh, Manchester, and subsequently St. Petersburg, Russia. His criticism of the Tsar and Russian aristocracy led to an abrupt departure for London where Lyall became the voice of liberalism and calls for political reform, before appointed British Resident Agent in Madagascar in 1827, representing the interests of the Tory establishment that he had hitherto so roundly castigated. However, Lyall discovered that the Malagasy crown had turned against the British alliance of 1820, his scientific pursuits alienated the local elite, and his efforts to re-establish British influence antagonized the queen, Ranavalona I, who accused Lyall of sorcery and forced him and his burgeoning family to leave for Mauritius where he died an untimely death, of malaria, in 1831.