Programme
2 Nov. 2023: Arielle Xena Alterwaite (University of Pennsylvania)
"Counterfeit Empire: Speculative Currency and the 1825 Haitian Indemnity."
Discussants: Stephen Mihm (University of Georgia), Rebecca L. Spang (Indiana University)
NOTE: The Seminar takes place online on Thursdays at 12pm (Haiti Time), today at 5pm (Paris Time) due to the time change with Europe (not 6pm).
Arielle Xena Alterwaite is a Ph.D. candidate at UPenn who studies slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world with a focus on France and its empire. She is broadly interested in histories of political economy, capitalism, national sovereignty, abolition, reparations, and imperialism. Her dissertation addresses the specific case of the 1825 Haitian Indemnity, where she explores Haiti's sovereign debt in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution and argues for the international significance of the debt for finance, monetary systems, nation-making, and political thought in the first half of the nineteenth century. Her writing about art and history has been published in Slavery & Abolition and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She received a B.A. in History (honors) and Philosophy from Columbia University (2018) and an M.A. in History from UPenn (2020).
Stephen Mihm is Professor and Department Head at the University of Georgia. He the author of A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Harvard University Press, 2007); and the co-author, with Nouriel Roubini, of Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance (Penguin Press, 2010), which was named as one of the "Top Ten Books of 2010" by the New York Times. He is also the co-editor, with Katherine Ott and David Serlin, of Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (NYU, 2002); and the editor of The Life of P.T. Barnum (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2017). He is also the author of a number of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and academic essays. Mihm is presently writing a history of standards and standardization in the United States for Harvard University Press.
Rebecca L. Spang is Distinguished Professor and Ruth N. Halls Professor at the Department of History and Director of the Liberal Arts + Management Program (LAMP) at Indiana University. She is a historian of politics, culture, and consumption who has published chiefly on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Her Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation—the assignats (a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as “circulating land”)—to write a new history of money and a new history of the French Revolution. It shows that revolutionary radicalization was driven by the ever-widening gap between political ideals and the experience of daily life and restores economics, in the broadest sense, to its rightful place at the heart of the Revolution (and hence of modern politics).
Registration
The Haiti Seminar
The Seminar takes an interdisciplinary approach, aiming to bring together scholars from diverse academic backgrounds. In particular, it will invite historians, economists and legal scholars to debate their perspectives and engage in fruitful exchanges. It seeks in particular to foster discussions that encompass both case studies and comparative approaches and enable to put in historical perspective questions of debt sustainability, debt forgiveness, conditionality, political control, etc.
Organisation
The Haiti Seminar is led by Marc Flandreau at the University of Pennsylvania in partnership with the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, and the School of Social Sciences and Government of the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico.
research grants
The Seminar is conceived to operate over a three-year period, commencing in 2023-24. The project will distribute a series of research grants. In particular, 10 Doctoral Prizes of 5,000 USD each will be awarded to registered PhD students located anywhere in the world and working on the history and economics of sovereign debt, a funding initiative supported by Crédit Mutuel, Paris.
The Seminar takes place online on Thursdays at 12pm (Haiti Time), today at 5pm (Paris Time) due to the time change with Europe (not 6pm).
It will be concluded by an academic conference in the Summer of 2026.
Inquiries: haiti.seminar@sas.upenn.edu