In 1974, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, the prime minister of independent Mauritius, observed that in the wake of the decolonization of East Africa and South and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean was “no longer a European lake.”1 This defiant observation, which he couched in the spirit of Afro-Asian solidarity that sought to dismantle the political and economic binds that the British Empire had established across the ocean, has been echoed repeatedly throughout the historiography of the Indian Ocean World. For example, in The Indian Ocean in World History, Alpers notes that the consolidation of British power in India, particularly in the wake of the 1857 mutiny, effectively transformed the Indian Ocean from an “Islamic Sea” into a “British Lake.”2
Campbell’s The Madagascar Youths is an engaging and rigorous study of the making of this “British Lake”—the rise of British economic and political hegemony—from the viewpoint of the southwest...