Pirates and Kings: Power on the Shores of Early Modern Madagascar and the Indian Ocean

This article describes the ways elites in Madagascar benefited from interactions with European and American pirates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Malagasy leaders expanded their knowledge of global patterns of exchange and used this knowledge to monopolize trade from the island. At the time, the identification and suppression of pirates became a conflict between trade systems in and around the island. The states formed by Malagasy elites challenged British and French influence in the southwestern Indian Ocean and came under attack during the nineteenth century, a period of expanding European power in the region.