From about 1810 Radama I, armed and trained under an agreement with the British governor of Mauritius, conquered the Betsileo, Sakalava and eastern coastal kingdoms and brought most of Madagascar under Merina rule. Conquest was financed and staffed by fanompoana, an unpaid labour obligation owed to the sovereign that was extended into military service, porterage, mining and construction, and by the enslavement of captured populations, who were moved to the highlands. Under Ranavalona I (1828-61) campaigns against the Sakalava and Bara continued and fanompoana was extended further; Gwyn Campbell's work on the period argues that campaign mortality, disease and the labour regime together produced a demographic decline in both the conquered provinces and Imerina itself. The queen's persecution of Christian converts and the 1835 ban on Christianity are better known in European accounts than the labour system, which historians now regard as the more consequential. Merina rule was itself ended by the French conquest of 1895.
The Merina monarchy of Antananarivo conquered most of Madagascar and imposed unpaid state labour (fanompoana) and military levies on its subjects
Gwyn Campbell's demographic work on nineteenth-century Madagascar, drawing on Merina court records, missionary observations and later French colonial counts, puts the island's population in the early nineteenth century at roughly 2 million, with estimates ranging from about 1.5 to 2.5 million. Campbell argues the population then stagnated or fell under the pressure of fanompoana labour service, military levies and the resulting famines and epidemics.
No reliable toll. Campbell's estimates of army losses on individual campaigns run into the tens of thousands, largely from disease and hunger rather than combat, but these are reconstructions from incomplete returns rather than records of deaths.
Missionary correspondence and Merina court records, analysed by Campbell, document the fanompoana labour obligation and the enslavement of war captives.
Madagascar