People

IOWC Director Gwyn Campbell

Gwyn Campbell

Gwyn Campbell holds a Canada Research Chair in Indian Ocean World History at McGill University.

Born in Madagascar, he grew up in Wales where he worked as a BBC radio producer in English and Welsh. He holds degrees in economic history from the universities of Birmingham and Wales and has taught in India (Voluntary Service Overseas) as well as at universities in Madagascar, Britain, South Africa, Belgium and France. He served as an academic consultant for the South African Government in a series of inter-governmental meetings which led to the formation of an Indian Ocean regional association in 1997.

A specialist in the economic history of the Indian Ocean, he is a member of McGill’s Centre for Developing Area Studies (CDAS) and African Studies Program.

As a participant in McGill’s Africa Field Studies Program he will travel with students to Eastern Africa next spring, the Zanzibar portion of which is a collaboration with IOWC associate Abdul Sherrif.

He is also a member of the sub-Saharan Africa team of the National Geographic and IBM Genographic Project. Led by Himla Soodyall, the five-year project which began in 2005 is researching early human origins and migrations, through a combination of historical research and DNA analysis.

His current research subjects include slavery, migration, diasporas, and the foundations of the Indian Ocean World global economy. He has a strong interest in the dynamics of minority cultures, imperialism, globalisation and third world development.

Publications-in-progress include: Africa and the Indian Ocean World from early times to 1900, scheduled to appear in the new Cambridge Economic History of Africa series, and (co-edited with Suzanne Miers & Joseph Miller), a two-volume collection of essays, Women and Slavery, to appear in the Ohio University Press series ‘Slave and Post-Slave Societies and Cultures’.

Among his other interests are painting, poetry and prose, and following the trials and tribulations of the Welsh rugby team.

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Publications

Reviews of Selected Books

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An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750-1895: The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire. African Studies Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005)

The Economic History is a major work of scholarship... a definitive work to which all future historians will be indebted

– Mervyn Brown (former British ambassador to Madagascar), Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

Campbell's study... transforms our understanding of Madagascar and its place in the history of the western Indian Ocean region. It is also a model of how economic data can inform social and political historical analysis. This is a highly significant intervention in an era when economic history is battling to retain support especially among Africanists and other scholars of the colonial encounter for whom quantitative data have become unfashionable.

– Nigel Worden (University of Cape Town), EH.NET.

a substantial and thought-provoking contribution to the understanding of slavery and labor in the Indian Ocean World ... compelling argument to consider Madagascar as an integral part of the history of eastern Africa

– Alison Fletcher (Kent State University), Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

a very valuable, informative ... book.

– Robert Ross (University of Leiden), Journal of African History

an economic tour de force around "Imperial Madagascar."

– Pier Larson (Johns Hopkins University), The American Historical Review

The great strength and originality of this study... lie in the surprising wealth of detailed economic information the author has unearthed about the fascinating attempt of the Merina monarchs to transform their society through education, industrialization, agricultural development, and the manufacture of their own weaponry, including cannons and firearms... Highly recommended.

J. E. Flint (emeritus, Dalhousie University), CHOICE

this study should be required reading for those who teach African and world history... One can only hope that more economic history of this calibre will be written on other parts of Africa

– Jeremy Rich (Middle Tennessee State University), Canadian Journal of History


Book Cover

The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, Studies in Slave and Post-Slave Societies and Cultures series (London: Routledge) 2004

Scholar of Indian Ocean history Campbell has assembled a rich and innovative collection of essays about the meaning of slavery in countries along the littoral of the Indian Ocean from the Cape to Cairo to Calcutta to Indonesia, and stretching further east to China and Korea... the extensive footnotes from archival, published, and unpublished sources and excellent writing give this volume great heuristic value... Highly recommended

– B. Weinstein (emeritus, Howard University), CHOICE


Book Cover

Southern Africa and Regional Cooperation in the Indian Ocean Region (London & New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003)

A rare and... useful reference book for (political) economists, students of (Southern) regionalism and strategists who wish to apply the idea of a developmental state to future regional integration in general and the Indian Ocean Rim in particular.

– Paul-Henri Bischoff (Rhodes University), H-Net


Book Cover

Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, Studies in Slave and Post-Slave Societies and Cultures series (London: Routledge).

This fine collection of essays is... from a linked series of stimulating conferences on slavery and forced labour in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia that Gwyn Campbell has organized... For students of comparative slavery and abolition, as for those of the Indian ocean, this is an important contribution to the literature.

– Edward Alpers (UCLA), Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies.

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