Bubble Colony: Saint-Domingue and the Debt of France

Sponsor: The Center for History and Economics (hybrid seminar)
Speaker: Malick W. Ghachem (MIT)

 The subordination of Haiti to the demands of servicing French public and private debt goes back to the Mississippi Bubble. It was in 1720 that Haitians were first placed under the yoke, not only of the tropical plantation enterprise, but of the perverse logic that says people of west African descent must be sacrificed to satisfy the unbridled monetary appetites and financial woes of the French nation. That is an unrecognized cost of the Mississippi Bubble and of so much of the Euro-Atlantic experience of financial modernization. The bubble that was the sugar revolution did not burst in Saint-Domingue with the defeat of Law’s plans for the colony. Instead, the planters internalized and privatized the financial and economic logic of the System against which they had rebelled, making of it a script for the management of plantation society. Saint-Domingue became a bubble colony.

The seminar will be held in Harvard University’s

Lee Gathering Room (S-030), CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street.

Lunch will be available after the talk.

More information on the seminar, including the Zoom link, is available here.