My piece for Foreign Policy on the crisis in Haiti and its relationship to the history of debt and monetary policy can be found in English here, and in French here.
Tag Archives: Haiti
On the constitutional void in Haiti
My essay on the ongoing constitutional crisis in Haiti as seen from the United States, for the MIT Center for International Studies précis magazine.
Supporting an amusement park for children in Haiti
Dear friends,
The Centre Haïtien de Recherche et d’Actions pour le développement (ChrAD) is a Haitian nonprofit organization dedicated the promotion of research and local community development, run by the historian Jean Fritzner Etienne, one of Haiti’s leading scholars of the colonial and revolutionary periods and an authority on the Catholic Church in Saint-Domingue/Haiti. CHrAD is raising money to support the building of an amusement park for children in Gressier (located south of the capital of Port-au-Prince) who have been traumatized by gang warfare in the Haitian capital and the permanent political unrest in the country. The initial fundraising campaign is being hosted by the Global Giving Accelerator. If the campaign can raise $5,000 by June 26, 11:59pm, it will receive a permanent place on the Global Giving website which will greatly facilitate the project’s long-term fundraising prospects. Please consider giving in any amount you can to support this worthy cause: the link to make a donation is here.
With thanks for your consideration,
Malick Ghachem
UCLA conference on “Exodus and Exile: Migrants, Refugees and Asylum Seekers 1750–1850”
Looking forward to speaking about the maroons of Saint-Domingue/Haiti at this upcoming UCLA conference on migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Fredrik Thomasson events on Haiti/Sweden/Colonial Archives Feb. 4 and 8, 2019 at Harvard/Radcliffe
Please join us for a lecture by Radcliffe Visiting Scholar Fredrik Thomasson entitled Sweden and Haiti, 1791-1825. Register here to attend.
Sweden and Haiti 1791–1825
Monday, February 4 | 4 PM
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
Knafel Center, Room 104, 10 Garden Street, Cambridge MA
Haitian historiography is evolving rapidly and the recent focus on the revolution has expanded to cover the first decades of the independent nation/s. New research has refuted the notion of Haitian post-independence isolation.
Uppsala University historian Fredrik Thomasson contextualizes these perspectives in a discussion of Swedish-Haitian relations from the beginning of the rebellions in the early 1790s to the Swedish recognition of Haiti in 1825. Thomasson will compare the reporting in Sweden to that in the Swedish Caribbean colony Saint Barthélemy where the Revolution was seen in a very different light.
The Swedish case is an interesting testimony both to the extent that the revolution was world news and how newly independent Haiti interacted with surrounding colonies, as well as with a distant Scandinavian nation.
Lite refreshments will be served. Register at http://bit.ly/FThomasson to attend.
Fredrik Thomasson
The Colonial Archive and Swedish Saint Barthélemy 1785–1878
Friday, February 8, 2019
12:00 – 1:15 PM
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
Byerly Hall (10 Garden Street, Cambridge)
Fredrik Thomasson, Department of History, Uppsala University
When Sweden sold the Caribbean island Saint Barthélemy to France in 1878, all governmental archives were left on the island. This collection is now held in the French colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence: Archives nationales d’outre-mer. Fonds Suédois de Saint Barthélemy (FSB) – with documents in mainly Swedish, French and English. It covers the entire Swedish period 1785–1878 and is by far the richest source on Swedish Caribbean colonialism.
The archive, c. 300.000 pages, is several times bigger than the material on the Caribbean possession in archives in Sweden but has, with very few exceptions, never been used by Swedish historians.
This presentation discusses the digitization project of the FSB and gives an account for the archive’s exceptional history.
Negotiations with institutional stakeholders and contact with a larger public confirms that this project is very much part of contemporary history and memory debates. Why was the archive never used, and why was there so little interest from Swedish archival institutions to make it accessible? Other issues to be discussed are the effects of digitization on colonial history, and to what extent access to this archive can change perceptions on Swedish Caribbean colonial history.
Interested in attending? Register as soon as possible at the bit.ly link above.
Seats for our lunches tend to fill quickly, so do register early. We will let you know if you receive a seat.
“The Jesuits, the Souls of Slaves, and the Struggle for Haiti, 1720-1725”: Nov. 7 at Harvard
Looking forward to speaking on November 7 about “The Jesuits, the Souls of Slaves, and the Struggle for Haiti, 1720-1725” at Harvard’s Mahindra 18th c. Studies Seminar. Details here.
Voices in the Legal Archives in the French Atlantic
Looking forward to this conference May 28-30 in Québec on “Voices in the Legal Archives in the French Atlantic,” at which I will present a paper entitled “Controlling Haitian History: Moreau de Saint-Méry and the Revolt against the Indies Company.”
Yale Early Modern Empires Workshop: The Jesuits in Haiti
Looking forward to visiting Yale’s Early Modern Empires Workshop Feb. 5 for discussion of “‘Our Crown and Glory’: The Jesuits, the Souls of Slaves, and the Struggle for Haiti” — the penultimate chapter of my book on the revolt against the Indies Company in Haiti, 1720-1725.
A short interview on my current project
A brief Q&A discussing my current research project and related issues.
The Jesuits in early eighteenth-century Haiti
Looking forward to discussing “The Jesuits, the Souls of Slaves, and the Battle for Saint-Domingue, 1720-1730” with the Boston College Legal History Roundtable this coming Thursday.