It has traditionally been considered that colonization had a greater, mostly negative, impact upon colonized peoples than any other factor in history, except possibly the slave export trade. Subject to the dictates of the colonial administration, the Malagasy alongside other colonized peoples were exploited, and their economy distorted, for the benefit of the colonizing power.
In reality, French colonial aspirations in Madagascar were severely restrained by external and domestic forces, the major one of which was the fluctuations in the international economy. Thus the establishment of colonial rule in Madagascar was facilitated by the recovery in the international economy in the decade prior World War I and by high European demand for tropical produce during and immediately after the conflict. Prices remained relatively buoyant until the depression, when the colonial administration introduced
The port of Toamasina (Tamatave), eastern Madagascar, about 1930. © SVT Bild/Das Fotoarchiv.
Protectionist measures designed to assist European settlers and companies.
A second external constraint was the climate. A cyclone strong enough to destroy 50 per cent to 80 per cent of plantation trees and cause considerable damage to the transport and ports infrastructure hits the east coast of Madagascar on average once every ten years. From 1939 to 1959, the region was visited by forty-nine cyclones, of which twenty-nine were of medium to severe velocity at over 100 miles an hour. Such natural factors, that accentuated the difficulties and thus cost of transport in an island of rugged terrain, isolated from most sizeable foreign markets, caused considerable year to year variations in the total value of trade.
The lack of labor constituted the major domestic hindrance to the French. Governor General Gallieni (1896-1905) envisaged the formation of a “Franco-Malagasy” race, but metropolitan French settlers were deterred by malaria and the generally infertile soils of Madagascar; the island attracted a mere handful of large French companies that survived only by diversifying: from commerce to plantation production and vice versa; and within agriculture by adopting a variety of cash crops. Thus the major “European” presence in Madagascar was impoverished Mascarene creole planters who depended on access to cheap Malagasy labor. Slavery was abolished in 1896, but many of the 500,000 liberated slaves remained in their former master’s homes as servants. Moreover, the population and population density was low, while the quality of labor was poor due to malnutrition, disease, and alcoholism. Only from the late 1930s did colonial health policies succeeded in accelerating the birth rate and lowering the death rate, with the result that the population expanded.
Moreover, the Malagasy were notoriously averse to contract labor. After initial attempts to recruit Indian and Chinese immigrant labor failed (the last immigrant workers were repatriated in 1907), the French administration, like the precolonial Merina regime, imposed forced labor, but their demand for labor for public works conflicted with the labor demands of private European concerns. Pressure from the latter resulted in private European access to SMOTIG, a public works scheme founded in 1926 using Malagasy military conscripts. Because of abuses, forced labor measures were periodically suppressed—including SMOTIG, which was banned in 1936. They also caused immense economic hardship for the Malagasy who did all in their power to evade them. As a result, they failed to relieve labor shortages, and European planters increasingly recruited Antandroy, Antaisaka, and Antaimoro contract labor from the more densely populated valleys of southeast Madagascar.
The traditional approach also underestimates the dynamic role under colonial rule of ordinary Malagasy. There was initially little difference between the immediate precolonial and colonial era for most Malagasy, some 90 per cent of whom continued to be employed in subsistence agriculture. However, in the 1920s the rise in the world price of tropical commodities led growing numbers of small farmers to grow successfully, alongside subsistence crops, export crops such as coffee, cocoa, vanilla, and sisal, the profits from which could be used to pay the taxes that released the producer from forced labor. Moreover, lower overheads and use of family labor enabled Malagasy producers to survive climatic and other vicissitudes better than poor creole producers.
During the 1930s depression, the colonial administration decided to favor coffee over other cash crops and introduced incentives to that effect. These measures had the inadvertent effect of persuading large numbers of small Malagasy producers to grow coffee. From 1932 both indigenous and European producers had access to agricultural credit at a maximum of 3 per cent interest, and by 1935 there existed 21 European and 292 Malagasy Agricultural Credit associations comprising over 8,000 members. At the same time, the cooperative movement took off, cooperatives playing an essential role in World War II, stockpiling products, notably coffee, which could no longer be shipped to France, and furnishing credit to producers. By 1945 there existed twenty-four Malagasy cooperatives (with 13,373 members) and by 1952, forty. Indigenous producers also appear to have gained substantially more than creole planters from technical assistance offered by the agricultural section of the administration.
By the time of the post-World War II boom in tropical products, the Malagasy farmer dominated the production of coffee, which was responsible for roughly one-third of exports by value. This applied both to high quality Arabica coffee, produced in comparatively small quantities mainly in the central highlands, and to lower quality varieties (Kouliou on the east coast and Robusta in the northwest), produced in far greater quantity in the lowlands. It is in this context that the 1947 revolt may be viewed. In 1946-1947 the administration, responding to European planter pressure, ignored the decision to ban forced labor in the French Union, and imposed it in the coffee producing regions of the east coast. The local Malagasy interpreted the measure as an attempt to stifle their own, more efficient production of coffee and rose in revolt. The rebels gained virtually no support from nationalist groups in Imerina and were brutally suppressed with the loss of probably between 90,000 and 100,000 Malagasy lives, one of the single bloodiest episodes in colonial history.
The damage inflicted by the revolt and its suppression effectively squeezed the creole planter out of production of coffee (which by 1952 accounted for 44 per cent of total exports) which, even on larger European plantations, was mostly in Malagasy hands. The creoles mostly entered the retail trade in urban areas but failed to displace the established position there of Indian or Chinese middlemen. The 1947 revolt also helped boost the nationalist cause, which had advanced rapidly in the aftermath of World War II when French prestige had suffered due to defeat by Germany, followed in 1942 by a British and South African invasion force that toppled the Vichy French administration in Madagascar. Rising nationalism, combined with the anticolonial stance of the United States, which through the Marshall Plan was largely responsible for resuscitating the war-devastated French economy, led to a change of colonial policy, and in 1960 France granted Madagascar political independence.
Gwyn R. Campbell
Further Reading
Brown, M. A History of Madagascar. Ipswich: Damien Tunna-cliffe, 1995.
Campbell, G. “The Cocoa Frontier in Madagascar, the Comoro Islands and Reunion, c.1820-1970.” In Cocoa Pioneer Fronts since 1800, edited by W. G. Clarence-Smith. London: Macmillan, 1996.
-. “The Origins and Development of Coffee Production
In Reunion and Madagascar.” In Coffee Pioneer Fronts, 1800-1970, edited by W. G. Clarence-Smith. London: Macmillan, forthcoming.
Deschamps, H. Histoire de Madagascar. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1972.
Verin, P. Madagascar. Paris: Kathala, 1990.
World History
