'One That's More Torrid': The Pirates of Madagascar

[Avery iii] killed or made slaves

As discussed in the introductory sections on the island, Madagascar was already part of the slave-trade network (largely via traders who came to the island from the Middle East in earlier centuries). However, on the island (as with most of the continent), slavery was a different practice from what was practices in the plantations of the Americas. Tasks were generally limited to "routine agricultural work or domestic tasks" and there was a complex hierarchy of enslaved peoples, in which enslaved peoples could sometimes even attain "greater privileges [than] persons of free rank. In many respects slaves and freemen seem to have led a fairly similar material existence" (Randrianja and Ellis 81). It seems likely here that the slavery being threatened as punishment was closer to the European-American model than the local one, given it is put roughly on par with death.

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