An Empire of Counting: The Multiple Origins of Imerina’s Military Bureaucracy and its Conflicts over Personal Identity (Madagascar, 1820-45)

Personal identity registration in Madagascar dates from the third decade of the nineteenth century. Registration systems were incrementally implemented between 1820 and 1845 within an expanding indigenous monarchy and military bureaucracy that sought to rule vast swaths of the island. The origins of that bureaucracy and its developing interests in literacy and numeracy, and their intersection in list-making—including registers of personal identity—were geographically, socially, and politically diverse. Although fashioned in the first instance at the conjunction of indigenous and European empire, and largely for their mutual benefit, the evolving bureaucracy became a site for multiple claims to advancement and authority. Royal court, civil secretaries, military officers, and even footsoldiers and civilians deployed bureaucratic skills and counting in their often competing interests, and typically to establish a public identity worthy of promotion. And they did so in both narrative documents and in the lists and enumerations classically associated with state registration systems. This paper traces the many origins of and interests in Madagascar’s earliest bureaucracy and its emerging registration systems. I commence with the spread of literacy and numeracy in the center of the island and then examine how the earliest registers of personal identity arose from a culture of military counting, list-making, and career promotion, on the one hand, and court efforts to gain access to manpower and cash for the army, on the other. These were later joined by independent efforts to establish civilian identities demanding reform of bureaucratic practices and denouncing administrative abuses. In early nineteenth-century Madagascar, establishing personal profiles and developing systematic registers of personal identity were closely related, had multiple origins, and were the outcome of many competing pursuits.