Main Areas of Interest

Latin American History

Colonial History (Spanish America)

US History

Atlantic History

Age of Revolution

Slavery Studies

Refugee History

Research Project

Exile and Empire in Western Cuba during the Age of Revolutions

Abstract

This research project delves into the exile of settlers from Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo to Havana and its hinterland between roughly 1791 and 1821. In the shadow of the Haitian Revolution, it sheds light on how French- and Spanish-speaking refugees from Hispaniola found refuge in Western Cuba. It shows how incremental, differential, and contested policies of asylum and assistance shaped the governance of exile in this growing imperial submetropolis and new transnational hub of refugee migration from the late eighteenth-century onwards. Against the backdrop of the internal and international shockwaves caused by the French/Haitian revolution and Bonapartist expansionism, it explores how exiled people both stood as collateral victims and agents of rising imperial competition and warfare.

Selected Publications

“An unlawful and contemptible adventure”: the Ducoudray-Holstein expedition and US foreign policy in the early 1820s Caribbean, Atlantic Studies (2021), DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2021.1948283

“Looking for Freedom in the Borderlands: U.S. Black Refugees from Slavery in Early Independent Mexico”, in Ronald A. Johnson and Ousmane Power-Greene (eds.), In Search of Liberty: African-American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2021), 57-86.

“Slavery, Resistance(s) and Abolition in Early Nineteenth-Century Chile”, Journal of Global Slavery 4:3 (2019), 372-403.  

“Freedom at the fringes? Slave Flight and Empire-Building in the Early Modern Spanish Borderlands of Essequibo-Venezuela and Louisiana-Texas” (with Bram Hoonhout), Slavery & Abolition 40:1 (2019), 61-86.

“Abolitionists, Smugglers and Scapegoats: Assistance Networks for “Fugitive Slaves” in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands (1836-1861)”, Mémoire(s), Identité(s), Marginalité(s) dans le Monde Occidental Contemporain [online], n°19 (2018). URL: https://journals.openedition.org/mimmoc/2731.
* To consult a full list of publications and CV, see

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