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: slavery
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.
Africa in Global History: A Colloquium on the Work of Joseph C. Miller
Looking forward to participating in this upcoming (Oct. 26) Harvard colloquium on the work of the great Africanist Joseph Miller of UVA, spearheaded by my wonderful new MIT colleague Kenda Mutongi. You can find the final program at this link and also just below:
MIT and the Task of History
A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege to participate in one of the most interesting and important dialogues I have been involved in as a historian. The occasion was the second of a series of forums on the “MIT and Slavery” project, an investigation of MIT’s relationship to slavery that MIT’s President Rafael Reif commissioned at the end of last academic year. The project has been spearheaded by my colleague Craig Wilder, who had the brilliant idea of creating an undergraduate research seminar (along with MIT archivist Nora Murphy) to undertake the investigation. The first forum in the series featured Craig and Nora as well as T.A. Claire Kim and a genuinely spectacular cohort of undergrads, who spoke on that day with a composure and degree of insight one would expect to see from an advanced historian (video here). The second forum, in which I was joined by Craig and MIT SHASS Dean Melissa Nobles as well as historians Tanalís Padilla and Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, was a follow-up response to questions from the MIT community about the purpose of studying this chapter of MIT’s past. The panel opened up onto a broader discussion of “the power of historical knowledge to make a better world,” from which I learned a great deal (not least by way of the lively Q&A with the audience that followed). A video recording of the event can be found here, and a news summary here. The event was organized by Emily Hiestand of the MIT SHASS Dean’s office.
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.
“The Limits of Revolution”
Reply
For those in the Boston area on Feb. 27, here’s a nice image of a panel I will be doing at Brandeis that afternoon/evening on “The Limits of Revolution” with Chris Brown, Suzanne Desan, and myself. The panel is part of the Brandeis Sawyer Seminar Rethinking the Age of Revolution (directed by Jane Kamensky and Sue Lanser with their fabulous postdoc fellow Julia Gaffield):
“The Other Revolution: Haiti, 1789-1804” (version 2.0!)
I am thrilled and delighted that my old friends at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island (a favorite research location) have remounted a new version of the 2004 exhibition that I curated in connection with the JCB’s bicentennial conference on the Haitian Revolution. The exhibition is open now through the end of April 2014 and is accompanied by a wonderful digital version that you can access here. The new version of the exhibition is part of a collaboration between the JCB and the New York Historical Society. If you have not yet seen the scintillating essays in the NYHS’s Revolution! volume that came out a few years ago (edited by Rabinowitz, Dubois, and Bender), by all means hasten to read them. Thanks so much to Susan Danforth, the JCB’s George S. Parker Curator of Maps and Prints, for all she did to make this new edition of the exhibition possible, and to Leslie Tobias Olsen for work on the website version. Looking forward to marking the occasion with a lecture on Haiti at the JCB on March 8 and, even before then, at a Feb. 21 panel that is part of the “Curators on International Slavery” series at Brown on Feb. 20-21, 2014.