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Ratsimilaho
- Ruled by Ratsimilaho, son of an English pirate and a Malagasy princess, the viable confederation extended along more than 200 miles of coastline. After Ratsimilaho’s death in 1750, the confederation began an abrupt, though prolonged, disintegration.
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From about 1774 to 1824, Madagascar was a favourite haunt for pirates. Many European sailors were shipwrecked on the coasts of the island, among them Robert Drury, whose journal is one of the few written depictions of life in southern Madagascar during the 18th century. Sailors sometimes called Madagascar "Island of the Moon".
In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Madagascar was frequented by European pirates (among them Captain William Kidd) who preyed upon shipping in the Indian Ocean. In the 18th century the Mascarene Islands to the east were colonized by the French with the help of Malagasy slaves.
It was ruled by a “Moorish king” and had an aristocracy with privileges deriving presumably from Islam. Their collective name was Zafindraminia, or “descendants of Raminia,” the ultimate great ancestor.
By the middle of the 17th century almost half the island, in the west and north, is ruled by a dynasty emerging from the Sakalava tribes. The Sakalava dominance, declining in the 18th century, is followed by that of a Merina family from the central plateau.
In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Madagascar was frequented by European pirates (among them Captain William Kidd) who preyed upon shipping in the Indian Ocean. In the 18th century the Mascarene Islands to the east were colonized by the French with the help of Malagasy slaves.
Until the late 18th century, the island of Madagascar was ruled by a fragmented assortment of shifting sociopolitical alliances. Beginning in the early 19th century, most of it was united and ruled as the Kingdom of Madagascar by a series of Merina nobles .
Although riven by civil war in the late eighteenth century, the kingdom was reunited under the ruler Andrianampoinimerina in the 1780s, and in the nineteenth century became a dominant political force in Madagascar.
