Two thousand years ago, Madagascar was probably uninhabited. An island twice the size of Great Britain, it was home to unique species of flora and fauna that were undisturbed by humanity until the first navigators landed on its shores. Since then, the changes imposed by humans on the wide range of environments to be found in this mini-continent have formed one of the threads of Madagascar's history. No one knows where the island's first inhabitants came from, but there was a strong connection from the earliest period to the islands of South East Asia - today's Indonesia.Austronesians, Arabs, Portuguese, and Dutch sailors and traders successively dominated the sea-lanes around Madagascar, some of the world's oldest long-distance shipping routes. Over the centuries, Madagascar developed its own distinctive language and cultural systems, absorbing migrants from every shore of the Indian Ocean. In the nineteenth century, Britain and France projected a new type of global power that had a major effect on the island, which became a French colony from 1896 to 1960. Throughout this colourful and often turbulent history, the tension between the formation of a highly original culture and the absorption of immigrants, the development of strong social hierarchies, a long experience of slavery and the slave trade, have all had effects that are still felt today. Now home to 17 million people, Madagascar is one of the world's most fascinating and least-known societies.

This book brings together multidisciplinary research on the historical, linguistic, anthropological and religious dimensions of ethnicity in Madagascar. The majority of Madagascans are born, live and die within their narrowly defined ethnic groups, and yet most tend to view these sterile and stereotyped identities negatively. But rather than forming definitive conclusions about ethnicities on the island, this work intends to open up the debates on collective identities, as they are expressed and embodied day to day. The study thus constitutes an indispensable preamble to an examination of the construction of the Madagascan nation state. Contents: the origin and character of the Malagasy language; the Marofotsy in the quest of liberty in the 1820s; language, dialects and ethnicity in Madagascar; nationalism and ethnicity in the province of Tamatave 1939-1960; and a critical evaluation of the processes of inculturation in Madagascar. (In French)