This is an important book. It should be required reading for anyone interested in what happened to African societies which were engaged in the slave trade. It goes without saying that it will also be read with interest by specialists in Madagascar, known in the trade as malgachisants. -- Stephen Ellis * JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH & IMPERIAL HISTORY *
... this stimulating, richly textured and finely crafted work ... demonstrates convincingly that a fuller understanding of important aspects of the African experience is impossible unless the islands of the southwestern Indian Ocean are incorporated into the mainstream of African history, and that future work on slavery and the external slave trade's impact on African peoples, cultures and states that ignores the Merina case will do so at its peril ... .This is an excellent book that merits a wide readership among not only Africanists, but also students of slavery elsewhere in the non-western world. Larson's detailed and well-documented account is an important contribution to the historiography of a part of the world usually overlooked by historians, and his reinterpretation of various aspects of Merina history and culture will give Malagasy specialists much to ponder. His sensitive and careful examination and analysis of complex sociocultural transformations in light of highland Madagascar's expanding economic and political connections with the Mascarenes and the western Indian Ocean attests to a refreshing willingness to put the blinders of geographical and disciplinary parochialism firmly aside. Finally, by challenging the accepted wisdom about the dynamics of identity, ethnicity and state formation, Larson raises important questions that future studies of pre-colonial Africa and slavery in the wider non-western world will have to take into consideration. -- Richard B. Allen * JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORY *
