Madeleine Ly-Tio-Fane, with the conceptual origins of the French Indo-Pacific

The notion of “Indo-Pacific” has become a focal point of French diplomacy, with Emmanuel Macron not hesitating to elevate the vast area thus designated as a “strategic priority”. If the formula is now common in the public space, we do not generally know that it was used for the first time as a geopolitical notion by a historian of spices, Madeleine Ly-Tio-Fane, in order to describe the French colonial expansion of 18th century.

Madeleine Ly-Tio-Fane (1928-2011) is a singular intellectual figure. Originally from Mauritius, she made her position as librarian at the Mauritius Sugar Industry Research Institute the starting point for a work as a historian devoted to the natural sciences and trade in the Indian Ocean. Her work is particularly interested in the action of three botanists French and their role in the introduction of plant species – particularly those producing spices – to the islands of France (Mauritius) and Bourbon (Reunion): Pierre Poivre (1719-1786); Céré (1738-1810) and Pierre Sonnerat (1748-1814).

One article in particular caught our attention: “Pierre Poivre and French expansion in the Indo-Pacific,” published in 1967 in le Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient. To our knowledge, this is the first time that the “Indo-Pacific” terminology has been used in its strictly geopolitical dimension to qualify French business in the region. Has Ly-Tio-Fane, for the duration of an article, turned into a geopolitician?

History of a geographical name

The term “Indo-Pacific” was certainly not invented by the Mauritian academic. It made an early foray into the social sciences in the 19th century under the pen of the British naturalist James Logan (1819-1869), before being taken up by the German geopolitician Karl Haushofer (1869-1946) in the interwar period.

In France, other analytical frameworks prevail: Far East, Asia-Pacific, Pacific Basin. We will have to wait for the development of an Indo-Pacific strategy by Emmanuel Macron, in May 2018, for the nomenclature to take hold. It is now widely taken up by the administrations and authorities concerned as well as by certain academics.

It is therefore to a Mauritian, Madeleine Ly-Tio-Fane, that the merit of having conceptualized this term in its French meaning, fifty years before the French president, goes. Under his pen, the Indo-Pacific designates the arc of French colonial expansion of the Bourbon bastions (today Reunion Island, NLDR) and the île de France (name of Mauritius during French colonization from 1715 to 1810, NLDR) to the Polynesian borders. In an 18th century in full turmoil, at a time when science and geopolitical conquest were advancing together, the singular journey of Pierre Poivre embodies this pivotal period of European projection in the Indo-Pacific space.

Pierre Poivre, a French geopolitics of spices

Putting an end to the Dutch monopoly on spices: this was Pierre Poivre’s great project.

Long controlled by Arab merchants, the spice trade in the Indian Ocean constitutes an age-old strategic issue, exacerbated by the arrival of European powers from 1498, when Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope. After Portuguese domination, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) blocked this trade in the 1620s and established itself as a hegemonic player through coercion and destruction.

At the start of the 18th century, the Batavian monopoly faltered: the rise of British power and the reorganization of Euro-Asian trade (the rise of coffee, tea and textiles) redefine commercial balances. France, expelled from North America in 1763, tried to interfere in this lucrative market by acclimatizing on its own territories the plants which provided the precious spices.

The man who embodies this ambition is Pierre Poivre. Initially intended for religious orders, he left for Asia in 1741 as a missionary belonging to the foreign missions of Paris and discovered, through contact with the Indonesian archipelagos, the wealth that the Dutch derived from the spice monopoly. A botanist as much as a trader, he renounced the priesthood and returned to France to convince the French East India Company to initiate a policy of acclimatization to the French Mascarenes.

He made several trips to the Indonesian archipelago, from where he clandestinely brought back plants, without succeeding in establishing them permanently on the island of Mauritius (then called the island of France since the French took possession of it in 1715). Appointed in 1767 intendant of the islands of France and Bourbon, he finally had the institutional levers necessary for his great project.

Mauritius, pivotal territory of French colonial ambitions in the Indo-Pacific

A military support point and essential stopover for trade towards Indian trading posts (Pondicherry, Mahé, Chandernagore, Yanaon and Karaikal), the island of France is quickly destined to become the center of the French system in the Indo-Pacific space.

While the island had been administered by the East India Company since 1721, King Louis XV ordered in August 1764 to return the territory to the Crown. The objectives assigned to the administrators are multiple: to stimulate the kingdom’s trade by creating an outlet for metropolitan goods; develop local production of groceries then monopolized by the Dutch and the English; and above all establish a reliable transit point on the route to Asia allowing vessels to be refitted, and provisions and equipment renewed, without depending on stopovers under foreign control.

Behind this “overwhelming role” given to the territory, everything remains to be built: administrative framework, urbanization, agriculture, expansion of the port. As the state transfers allocated to the colony were derisory, it had to provide for its own needs, notably through the spice trade. This is precisely the mission entrusted to Pierre Poivre.

With an intimate knowledge of local political networks acquired during his travels, Poivre identified areas where neither the English nor the Dutch exercised effective control. Three expeditions to the Moluccas are organized; soon, links with the population of Gebe were established, and clove plants and nutmeg seeds were brought back to Mauritius. The botanists Jean-Nicolas Céré and Joseph Hubert, disciples of Pierre Poivre, succeeded in the feat of acclimatizing these two species to Mauritius and Reunion Island. The clove tree successfully acclimatized in Mauritius, which became a significant producer at the end of the century. Nutmeg had more mixed results.

Beyond the spices, the intendant Pierre Poivre, also commissioner general of the Navy, will seek to transform the island of France into the center of gravity of French expansion in the Indo-Pacific space, well beyond the Indian Ocean.

Horizons Indo-Pacifiques : de l’île de France à la « nouvelle Cythère »

Madeleine Ly-Tio-Fane, with supporting archives, transcribes at length the hopes and ambitions that the intendant harbored from his “boulevard” on the ®le de France.

First in the Indian Ocean: mapping of currents and monsoons, search for faster routes to Indian trading posts, establishment of spices in the Seychelles, stubborn quest for the imaginary island of Juan de Lisboa.

Then in the Southern Ocean: convinced that a still unknown southern continent would ultimately allow trade between Asia and America to be controlled, Poivre supported the expeditions of Kerguelen and Marion-Dufresne.

Finally, the Commissioner General of Marine is also prospecting the Pacific: at a time when Bougainville has just concluded his first world tour and discovered “the new Cythera” (Tahiti), he pleads for Mauritius to become “a springboard for French development towards the Pacific”, and that new expeditions set sail from Port-Louis rather than mainland France. The colony of Ile de France is also intended to become the “breadcrumb” of any French expansion project in the Indo-Pacific zone.

This expansionist dynamic in the Indo-Pacific is not limited to Poivre’s initiative alone. It is part of a context of collective emulation which animates a whole generation of explorers, men of science and French navigators who encountered Pierre Poivre on the island of France, an intellectual as well as logistical center: Bouvet de Lozier, Surville, Bougainville, Marion-Dufresne, Commerson, Jeanne Baret, Le Gentil, Véron, the Knight Grenier and many others…

Without forgetting the sadly famous Ahutoru, the first Tahitian embarked in mainland France by Bougainville, whose presence in Paris nourished the reflections of philosophers, notably Diderot in Bougainville Travel Supplement. The Polynesian will also cross paths with Pierre Poivre in Mauritius, but unfortunately dies in Madagascar in 1772 and will never see his island again.

If these trips constitute notable advances from a scientific point of view, they also reveal the tension between a geopolitical ambition and the material constraints of a fragile colony, still in search of its economic foundations. These expensive expeditions are carried out while the island lacks everything. Poivre and his expansionist aims were thus strongly criticized, notably by his successor Jacques Maillart-Dumesle.

Between scientific ideal and colonial ambitions

Exaggerated or not, Pierre Poivre’s Indo-Pacific vision and the central role he confers on the Ile de France outline the contours of a French strategic continuum linking the Indian Ocean to South-East Asia and, beyond, to the Pacific Oceanian.

Paradoxically, the success of the project to establish spices marks the end of this first French expansionist impulse in the region which will have no future. The wars of the Empire will mobilize energies and fleets elsewhere, relegating these Indo-Pacific ambitions to a deferred horizon, which will not be fully reactivated until the 19th century. Symbolic if ever there was one, Mauritius came under British sovereignty in 1814.

Through the study of the odyssey of Pierre Poivre and his quest for mastery of the spice trade, Madeleine Ly-Tio-Fane perfectly transcribes the dichotomy of this first French enterprise: between scientific ideal carried by characters with extraordinary destinies, children of the philosophy of Lights and gray areas of a project that is above all colonial, mercantilist and expansionist. An illusory and unfinished ambition, but whose traces still structure contemporary French political geography.