Paper short abstract:

Madagascar exhibits characteristics of landlocked country, despite being the largest island in Africa. This paradox is the result of a longue-durée path evolution, in which local factors, regional trade mechanisms and global affaires constantly interact to produce new human geographic structure.

Paper long abstract:

Being the fourth largest island in the world and the largest island in Africa, Madagascar has the longest coastline among all African countries. It also holds a seemingly important geographic position in the Indian Ocean. Counter-intuitively, however, Madagascar's coast has long been underdeveloped and the country is peripheral in global maritime network and economic system. Moreover, Madagascar exhibits the characteristics of a landlocked country - its economic, political, and cultural center is located on its central highlands.

Through my research, I found that this strange yet intriguing human geographic feature is the result of a long historical path-evolution that began to emerge before and during the Age of Discovery, and was further solidified by the slave trade and colonial activities. This path-evolution has established the inland dominance over coastal regions in Madagascar and led the big island to its current landlocked situation. Moreover, it is still exerting influence on the country’s development today.

The paper presented here focuses on one period of this long evolution - the slave trade. During this period, the small-scale slave trade in the southwest Indian Ocean interacted with the cultural system of Madagascar’s inland kingdom (Imerina) under the particular geographic conditions of the island. The whole process constituted a kind of dissipative mechanism which contributed to the formation of a Madagascar dominated by its inland.

It is expected that the paper provides a new case to rethink the relationship between inland/hinterland and coast in Eastern Africa, especially how local and external factors are entangled.