Indemnitaires and Obligataires

• Department of History

Professor Alexia Yates (EUI History Department) will give a talk in the framework of the History Department Monthly Research Meetings.

This talk stems from Alexia Yates’s current book project on the practices and cultures of investment in nineteenth-century France. France’s recognition of Haitian independence in 1825 included the imposition of an enormous indemnity payment from Haiti to former colonists, and the obligation to find the necessary funds by borrowing from French banks. These arrangements transformed former colonial property in people and land into a national debt that perpetuated, in various forms, into the twentieth century. Assessing the work of Haiti’s French creditors across this period as they lobbied for payment, this talk approaches the debt as a structure that institutionalized principles and mechanisms important to France’s modern economic imperialism, analyzing how investors large and small engaged themselves and the French public in debates about the value of that imperialism.