Programme
12 Oct. 2023: Malick Ghachem (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
"The Debt and the Indemnity: Reconstructing French and Haitian Finances, 1720-2025."
Discussants: François Velde (Federal Reserve, Chicago), Arnaud Orain (Paris 8)
Malick W. Ghachem is a historian and lawyer. He is Head of History, Professor of History, and Research Affiliate at the Center for International Studies at MIT. His primary areas of concentration are slavery and abolition, criminal law, and constitutional history. He is the author of The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012), a history of the law of slavery in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) between 1685 and 1804, now out in French translation also. The book received the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major Prize for the best work in English on French history and was co-winner of the Caribbean Studies Association’s Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize for the best book published in the field of Caribbean studies over the past three years. He teaches courses on the Age of Revolution, Slavery and Abolition, American criminal justice, and other topics.
François Velde is Senior Economist and Economic Advisor in the Economic Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Velde's primary research on monetary history and monetary theory has been published in numerous journals. His research topics include medieval currency debasements, the monetary history of the United States, dollarization in Argentina and the macroeconomics of the French revolution. In 2002, Velde and Thomas Sargent co-authored the book The Big Problem of Small Change (Princeton University Press), which studies how monetary systems in Western European economies evolved in response to recurring shortages and depreciation of small change. Velde earned an undergraduate degree at the École Polytechnique in France and a Ph.D. in economics at Stanford University.
Arnaud Orain is Professor in Economic History at the Paris 8 Institute of European Studies. He is the author of Les savoirs perdus de l’économie. Contribution à l’équilibre du vivant" (Paris, Gallimard, 2023) and La Politique du Merveilleux. Une autre histoire du Système de Law. 1695-1795 (Paris, Fayard, 2018). His research explores older forms of economic knowledge that were influential before the emergence of "economics" in the 18th century: the dialogical discourse on commerce, economic fictions, the "oeconomy", and the alchemical science. The issue is to study genres and methods rather than schools and theories in order to rethink a field in crisis.
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)/ 6 pm (Paris Time).
It will be concluded by an academic conference in the Summer of 2026.
Inquiries: haiti.seminar@sas.upenn.edu