Play and Possession: Sex, Marriage and Household at Fort Dauphin (Madagascar), c.1660s

Imagined as a colony of settlement and an entrepôt of trade, France’s first outpost in the Indian Ocean began in 1642 in a region of south-east Madagascar called Anosy. The settlement lasted 32 years. The abandonment of Fort Dauphin, as it become known, in 1674 and the shift of French Indian Ocean empire toward South Asia and île de Bourbon has obscured the scale, nature and astounding impact of the ‘lost’ French settlement. Because Fort Dauphin was conceived as a colony of European settlement, the composition of its population was a leading concern for all who invested in, administered, religiously supervised and commented upon it. This article focuses on certain dimensions of that preoccupation: marriage, sex and household formation during the 1660s, when the colony’s European population was largest and when Fort Dauphin was ruled by the 1664 French East India Company. War and raids represented one key mode of Fort Dauphin’s engagement with the indigenous people of Madagascar. Sex and marriage represented another, extraordinary for the violent, unstable environment in which they transpired. Many French men at Fort Dauphin engaged in sexual relationships with free and enslaved Malagasy women. While dimensions of Anosy’s sexual culture were unfamiliar to them, they soon adapted and became integrated into local circuits of friendship and marriage. The households formed from these unions played a key role in recycling plunder taken in war into the local networks in which French men became embedded. Sexual and companionate relationships in Fort Dauphin emerge as important sites for understanding both the colony and later French empire in the Indian Ocean.