An important thing to remember about slavery is that it is never seen—by anyone really—as a moral relationship, but one of simple arbitrary power: the master can order the slave to do whatever he pleases, and there’s really nothing the slave can do about it.51 When the French overthrew the Merina kingdom and took over Madagascar in 1895, they simultaneously abolished slavery and imposed a government that similarly did not even pretend to be based on a social contract or the will of the governed, but was simply based on superior firepower. Unsurprisingly, most Malagasy concluded that they had
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