The History of Madagascar

Record summary

William Ellis’s history of Madagascar describes nineteenth-century Protestant missions, Malagasy court religion, divination, healing, sacred objects, spirit-related beliefs, and persecution or resistance surrounding conversion. It is useful for comparing how missionaries interpreted indigenous ritual and royal religious authority as superstition or spiritual opposition. The book is identifiable through Ellis, the London Missionary Society, and the 1838 publication. It is a confessional history rather than detached ethnography, and events are narrated to support arguments about Christian mission and Malagasy conversion.