Colonial annexation of Madagascar automatically abolished slavery

Evidence

In the Malagasy delegation, not everyone agreed with Didier Ratsiraka’s uncompromising stance. Most of his colleagues tried to convince him to give up abandoning the franc zone. The French, aware of this rift, tried to take advantage of it to get him replaced. Ratsiraka was accused by Jacques Foccart, the then Secretary General for African and Malagasy Affairs, of being a ‘kind of extreme leftist fanatic’. The French government informed the Malagasy head of state, General Ramanantsoa, that they would increase aid to Madagascar if he got rid of Ratsiraka. It proved futile: the general gave ‘carte blanche’ to Ratsiraka to continue his mission. Paris interrupted the negotiations several times, hoping to gain time and to convince the Malagasy to give up their demands. — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 181 (#expands, via linked claim)

The formal endings of slave systems of production in the nineteenth century marked the beginnings of a profound reorganization of the capitalist world system. In Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, through the deepening penetrations of monopoly capitalism and the impositions of hegemonic colonialisms, slaves were displaced as a source of cheap labor power by peasants and migrant laborers. In Africa, whereas the slave trade had dislocated the reproductive cycles of certain social formations along the coasts of West and southern Africa, the “new imperialism” of monopoly capitalism demanded a more destructive form of appropriation and exploitation. The colonial state parasitized the peasants of the continent’s agrarian hinterlands, transforming traditional economic sectors from the project of reproduction into the source and support of forcibly recruited labor and the sites of cash-crop monoculture and the extraction of minerals and raw materials. To the extent that wage labor expanded in Africa, its level of support was limited to maintenance and not reproduction of labor. In the New World there were also changes. The systems of reconstitution of Black communities were, as well, assaulted by forms of forced labor: peonage, share-cropping, and less than subsistence farming. Moreover, Black workers were subject to displacement from productive land and to publicly and privately organized campaigns of terror and intimidation. Ineluctably, resistance was propelled toward new forms, new consciousness, and new ideologies. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Abolition of slavery coincided with capitalism’s reorganization toward new labor forms — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434; France tried to bribe Madagascar to replace its reformist negotiator, without success. — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 181; Colonial slave codes legally defined enslaved humans as chattel

Related

• France tried to bribe Madagascar to replace its reformist negotiator, without success. (similarity 0.88)
• Abolition of slavery coincided with capitalism’s reorganization toward new labor forms (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• France tried to bribe Madagascar to replace its reformist negotiator, without success. #expands (0.60) — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 181
• Abolition of slavery coincided with capitalism’s reorganization toward new labor forms #expands (0.40) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434