Joint Center for History and Economics Online Seminar

Malick Ghachem

 

Bubble Colony: Saint-Domingue and the Debt of France

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.

 

Malick W. Ghachem is Head of History and Professor of History at MIT. His primary areas of concentration are slavery and abolition, criminal law, and constitutional history. He also writes and speaks on issues of academic freedom, free expression, and diversity.