Programme

28 March 2024: "Debt, Fraud and the Making of Countries: A Book Panel."

Panel on the occasion of the translation of Damian Clavel's  Créer un pays, le royaume de Poyais Gregor MacGregor, emprunts d’État et fraude financière 1820-1824

With: Damian Clavel (University of Zurich), Maria Christina Chatziioannou (Institute of Historical Research, NHRF), Anna Gelpern (Georgetown University), and Nathaniel Millett (Saint Louis University)

Chair: Trevor Jackson (University of California, Berkeley)

Damian Clavel is interested in combining micro-history and global history of capitalism. His first book, entitled “Créer un pays, le royaume de Poyais: Gregor MacGregor, emprunts d’État et fraude financière 1820-1824,” studies the foundations of sovereign credit relationships and British informal imperialism in the 19th century. It does so by revisiting the case of the “fake” country of Poyais, an alleged financial fraud based on the sale of bonds into the 1820s London Stock Market for a non-existing Central American state. The study of scarcely considered European and Latin American archival documents reveals that the Poyaisian project incarnated not so much a fraud. Rather, it constituted a failure to finance the creation of a private commercial and a concrete sovereign project under British influence on a Central American continent undergoing significant colonial and Indigenous political reconfigurations. As an SNF Ambizione Fellow at the University of Zurich, he is launching his second project, “Deconstructing Fraudulent Indigenous Utopias: A History of Failed Miskitu and Mapuche Loans on European Money Markets in the Age of Revolutions.” It studies if and how American Indigenous polities accessed 19th-century British and French capital markets.

Maria Christina Chatziioannou is Director of Neohellenic research at the Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation. She is a specialist in the social and economic history of Greece, diaspora studies, and the history of trade. Chatziioannou is a graduate of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Sapienza University of Rome. She has taught at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the University of Crete and has been a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, C.R.H., Paris.

Anna Gelpern is a Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and International Finance at Georgetown Law and a nonresident senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics. She has published research on government debt, contracts, and regulation of financial institutions and markets. She has co-authored a law textbook on International Finance, and has contributed to international initiatives on financial reform and government debt. She co-directs the Sovereign Debt Forum, a collaboration among Georgetown Law’s Institute of International Economic Law and academic institutions in the United States and Europe, dedicated to cutting edge research and capacity building in sovereign debt management. Between 1996 and 2002, Professor Gelpern served in legal and policy positions at the U.S. Treasury Department. Earlier she practiced with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen &Hamilton in New York and London.

Nathaniel Millett is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Saint Louis University. He is an historian of the early modern and nineteenth century Atlantic World. He is particularly interested in the experience of Indigenous and African people in southeastern North America and the Caribbean. His work is comparative, trans-regional, and interdisciplinary. His first book, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World focused on the maroon community (independent escaped slave community) located at and around Prospect Bluff on the Apalachicola River in Spanish Florida between 1814 and 1816. His current book project is entitled Native Sea: An Indigenous History of the British West Indies during the Age of Slavery and Empire. The project details and analyzes the role that was played by Indigenous people within and between many societies across the Caribbean basin from the early sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. He has also published on the history and memory of slavery at Saint Louis University.

Trevor Jackson is Assistant Professor at University of California, Berkeley. He is an economic historian who researches inequality and crisis, mostly but not exclusively in early modern Europe. His first book, Impunity and Capitalism: the Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830, was published by Cambridge University Press in fall 2022​.  It examines how impunity has gradually shifted since the seventeenth century from the sole possession of a legally-immune sovereign to a functional characteristic of technically-skilled professional managers of capital, to an imagined quality of markets themselves, such that a constituent element of the modern economic sphere is that within it, great harm can and will happen to great many people, and nobody will be at fault.  His current research interests focus on the problem of gluts, overproduction, and overaccumulation since the seventeenth century, the problems of temporality and finitude in economic thought, and problems in the historical measurement and meaning of capital.  He also has an ongoing research interests in the histories of extinction and catastrophe, as well as early modern occupational health.

Panel on the occasion of the translation of Damian Clavel's  Créer un pays, le royaume de Poyais Gregor MacGregor, emprunts d’État et fraude financière 1820-1824

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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.

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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