Solynth Network · Economic History

Madagascar and the Industrial Revolution

Not a contributor to Britain's revolution, but an independent attempt at industrial modernisation.

Robert Harvey Curtis  |  Solynth Network  |  27 July 2026  |  RAG-checked, corrected edition

Madagascar had essentially no significant role in the Industrial Revolution as the term is conventionally understood, meaning the British and Western European mechanisation of roughly 1760 to 1840. It was not a major supplier of industrial raw materials to Britain, not an important export market, and not a node in the coal, iron, cotton, and capital networks that drove mechanised production. Anyone who frames the island as a contributor to that story is making a claim the mainstream economic history does not support.

The genuinely interesting connection runs the other way. During the same decades that Britain was industrialising, the Merina kingdom of highland Madagascar attempted its own state-directed industrialisation, deliberately in order to avoid dependence on the European powers. Where to date the beginning of that effort is contested. The familiar narrative treats the two reigns as opposites. It casts Radama I, who ruled from 1810 to 1828, as the outward-facing moderniser who signed a formal alliance with Britain in 1817, ended the export of slaves, and encouraged the London Missionary Society to establish schools. It casts his successor Ranavalona I, who ruled from 1828 to 1861, as the ruler who reversed that openness, expelled nearly all foreigners, and insisted that Madagascar develop on its own terms. On that telling the autarky is Ranavalona's signature alone.

The specialist literature complicates the picture. Gwyn Campbell, the standard economic historian of imperial Madagascar, dates the industrial experiment from 1825 and identifies a declaration of autarky in 1826, from which point the Merina crown took on the salaries, lodging, and provisioning of the foreign artisans on the island. That places the beginning within Radama's reign. The reconciliation is that two different axes are in play. Radama's openness was diplomatic and religious, his engagement with Britain and the missionaries. The autarky was economic, a self-sufficiency and import-substitution drive that used those very European artisans and their skills to build indigenous manufacturing capacity. Ranavalona then fused that industrial programme with political and religious closure, which is why she tends to receive sole credit for it. This early dating is a revisionist reading rather than a settled fact, and it should be weighed as such.

Timeline of the Merina industrial experiment, 1760 to 1878 A vertical timeline placing the Merina kingdom's state-led industrialisation within the era of the British Industrial Revolution. The Merina industrial experiment A defensive, state-led drive set against the age of British mechanisation. 1760–1840 British Industrial Revolution: mechanisation transforms Britain and Western Europe. The backdrop, not a story Madagascar is part of. 1810 Radama I accedes. British alliance in 1817, an end to slave exports, and missionary schools. Openness that was diplomatic and religious. 1825–1826 Industrial experiment and a declaration of autarky begin under Radama I, on Campbell's dating. A revisionist reading, and still contested. 1828 Ranavalona I accedes. She fuses the industrial drive with political and religious closure: foreigners expelled, Christianity suppressed. 1831 Jean Laborde, a French adventurer, is shipwrecked on the island and taken into the queen's service as her chief engineer. c. 1837 The Mantasoa complex is begun: five factories with blast furnaces and numerous workshops, the largest of several industrial sites. c. 1850 Mantasoa employs a standing workforce of about five thousand; some twenty thousand had earlier been levied to build it. 1857 A failed plot involving Prince Rakoto and the merchant Lambert. Laborde and all Europeans are expelled; the factories are confiscated. 1861 Ranavalona I dies. Under her successor Radama II the island reopens, and Laborde is able to return. 1878 Jean Laborde dies at Mantasoa. A dispute over his estate later becomes a French pretext for intervention. Red markers denote the contested dating (1825–1826) and the collapse (1857).
Figure 1. Timeline of the Merina industrial experiment set within the era of British mechanisation. The 1825 to 1826 dating follows Gwyn Campbell and is a revisionist reading rather than settled fact.

The centrepiece of the effort was Jean Laborde, a French adventurer shipwrecked on the island in 1831. He first manufactured muskets and gunpowder at Ilafy, and then from around 1837 organised a large forced-labour workforce to build an industrial complex at Mantasoa, sited near water, wood, and iron ore. It was the largest of several such sites. Campbell describes Mantasoa as comprising five factories with blast furnaces and numerous workshops, producing cannon, muskets, gunpowder, glass, porcelain, soap, bricks, cement, and a wide range of other goods. The labour figures are worth stating precisely, because they measure two different things. The complex was built by a fanompoana, a corvée levy, of around twenty thousand workers, equivalent to about five per cent of the adult Merina male population, and once it was operating it maintained a permanent workforce of roughly five thousand. By 1850 that standing workforce of about five thousand was spread across the five factories. The twenty thousand is the construction levy and the five thousand is the operating establishment, and both figures are correct for their respective quantities.

The accurate way to state Madagascar's relationship to industrialisation, then, is not as a peripheral input to Britain's revolution but as an independent, defensive, and largely contemporaneous attempt at industrial modernisation on the island itself. Mantasoa belongs in the same conceptual family as other nineteenth-century state-led modernisation drives, such as Muhammad Ali's Egypt and, later, Meiji Japan, efforts by non-European rulers to acquire industrial and above all military capacity precisely in order to resist European domination. It was import-substitution and defensive modernisation before those terms existed. Where it differed sharply from the British model is that it was coerced from above and rested on forced labour rather than on wage labour and private capital, which is one reason it proved fragile and did not outlast its royal sponsor and its foreign engineer. Laborde was expelled in 1857, along with the other Europeans, after a failed plot involving Ranavalona's son Rakoto and the French merchant Joseph-Francois Lambert, and his factories were confiscated. Workers destroyed much of the Mantasoa complex once he had gone. He returned to Madagascar only after the queen's death in 1861, under her successor Radama II, and died at Mantasoa in 1878.

Ranavalona's own reputation is contested, and it is worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. European accounts branded her the mad queen of Madagascar, while many Malagasy historians view her instead as a fierce defender of sovereignty. Her reign combined the industrial ambition described above with the expulsion of foreigners, the persecution and execution of Christian converts, and the harsh forced-labour system that built Mantasoa in the first place. Both things are true at once, and how one weighs them tends to track whether one is reading the colonial-era European sources or the nationalist reappraisal.

On confidence The core of this account, Laborde, Ranavalona, Mantasoa from the late 1830s, the self-sufficiency motive, and the 1857 expulsion, is consistent across independent sources and the specialist literature. The workforce numbers come from Campbell and are the best available, though pre-colonial Malagasy statistics are inevitably approximate. The one genuinely contestable interpretive claim is the dating of the autarky drive to Radama's reign rather than Ranavalona's, which reflects Campbell's economic history and cuts against the more familiar political narrative, so it should be read as a scholarly argument rather than an agreed fact.

Summary infographic

Note on the panel below The infographic is reproduced as originally produced and carries three details that should be corrected against the sources before republication. It gives Jean Laborde's dates as 1803 to 1857; he was in fact born in 1805 and died in 1878, and 1857 was the year of his expulsion rather than his death. It cites Campbell's book as covering 1750 to 1896 and dated 2017; the correct span is 1750 to 1895 and the year of publication is 2005. And the two further-reading titles, attributed to Newbury and to Walsh, could not be verified against any catalogue and should be confirmed or removed.
Infographic summarising Madagascar and the Industrial Revolution: the headline that Madagascar was not a contributor to Britain's revolution, a timeline of the Merina kingdom, the Mantasoa complex, Ranavalona's contested legacy, comparisons with Egypt and Japan, and how the effort differed from Britain.
Figure 2. Summary infographic, Madagascar and the Industrial Revolution (Solynth Network). Reproduced as produced; apply the three corrections noted above to the source graphic.

Sources

Gwyn Campbell, An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750 to 1895: The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Gwyn Campbell, "An industrial experiment in pre-colonial Africa: the case of imperial Madagascar, 1825 to 1861," Journal of African History (1991).
Reference and encyclopaedic accounts of the 1857 plot and the expulsion of Europeans, including the standard entries on Ranavalona I and on Jean Laborde, corroborate the dates and sequence given here.