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The Role of British Political Agents and Missionaries in Perpetuating Slavery and Forced Labour in Nineteenth-Century Madagascar

Prof. Gwyn Campbell
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In 1807, under mounting pressure from the growing anti-slavery lobby, Parliament in London banned the slave trade. In 1810, British forces seized the French Mascarene islands of R茅union and Mauritius, dominated by slave plantation economies. In 1815, R茅union was handed back to France, but Britain retained Mauritius because it safeguarded the maritime route to India, the 鈥渏ewel鈥� of the British Empire. As Madagascar was the closest and thus cheapest supplier of provisions and servile labour required by the Mascarenes, Farquhar, governor of Mauritius, sought to bring it under British informal domination. In 1820, Britain signed a treaty with Radama I (r. 1810-28) of Madagascar, central to which was the prohibition of slave聽exports in return for British aid 鈥� which included the establishment there of a permanent British聽political agent and LMS missionaries charged聽with ensuring the application by Radama of the聽anti-slave trade ban. However, while espousing anti-slavery sentiments, all British agents to Madagascar used unfree labour 鈥� something they did their utmost to keep secret from their political and religious backers in Britian. This paper explores the reasons for, and nature of, this clandestine exploitation of servile labour.