Malick W. Ghachem
· Head of History Professor of History Research Affiliate at the Center for International StudiesMassachusetts Institute of Technology · History
Active 2003–2025
About
Malick W. Ghachem is a professor whose work engages with issues related to academic freedom, free expression, and the Israel-Palestine campus conflict. His views on these topics, including the dynamics of student protests and university policies, are articulated through his writings and public statements. He has contributed to discussions on neutrality, diversity, and the making of the Kalven Report at MIT, reflecting his engagement with the ethical and political dimensions of higher education. His writings have been published in outlets such as Academe, the magazine of the AAUP, and he has participated in university meetings and public debates concerning free expression and campus activism.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Law
- History
- Sociology
- Ancient history
- Art
- Literature
- Geography
- Philosophy
- Archaeology
- Aesthetics
- Art history
Selected publications
Princeton University Press eBooks · 2025-07-08
book1st authorCorrespondingPrinceton University Press eBooks · 2025-05-06
book1st authorCorrespondingA new account of how Haiti under French colonial rule became a violent sugar plantation state In the early eighteenth century, France turned to its New World colonies to help rescue the monarchy from the wartime debts of Louis XIV. This short-lived scheme ended in the first global stock market crash, known as the Mississippi Bubble. Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was indelibly marked by the crisis, given its centrality in the slave-trading monopoly controlled by the French East Indies Company. Rising prices for enslaved people and devaluation of the Spanish silver supply triggered a diffuse rebellion that broke the company’s monopoly and paved the way for what planters conceived as “free trade.” In The Colony and the Company , Malick Ghachem describes how the crisis that began in financial centers abroad reverberated throughout Haiti. Beginning on the margins of white society before spreading to wealthy planters, the revolt also created political openings for Jesuit missionaries and people of color. The resulting sugar revolution, Ghachem argues, gave rise to an increasingly violent, militarized planter state from which the colony, and later Haiti, would never recover. Ghachem shows that the wealthy planters who co-opted the rebellion were simultaneously locked in a showdown with maroon resistance. The conflict between the planters’ militant defense of their prerogatives and maroon rebellion laid the foundations for a brutal history of marginalization and immiseration. Haiti became a full-fledged plantation colony held together by a ruthless form of white supremacy and enslavement, triggering a cycle of escalating violence that led to the Haitian Revolution. Tragically, Haiti’s postrevolutionary future remained captive to the imperial sway of money and debt.
The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism
Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023 · 1 citations
- Sociology
- Political Science
- History
This major new reference work with contributions from an international team of scholars provides a comprehensive account of ideas and practices of nationhood and nationalism from antiquity to the present. It considers both continuities and discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically with the scholarly literature in the field. Volume I starts with a series of case studies of classical civilizations. It then explores a wide range of pivotal moments and turning points in the history of identity politics during the age of globalization, from 1500 through to the twentieth century. This overview is truly global, covering countries in East and South Asia as well as Europe and the Americas.
Empire, War, and Racial Hierarchy in the Making of the Atlantic Revolutionary Nations
Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- History
- Art history
In 1954, the great African-American painter Jacob Lawrence conceived of a remarkable series of paintings that would, in his words, “depict the struggles of a people to create a nation and their attempt to build a democracy.” Initially, he had in mind a grand narrative beginning with the “causes and events leading into the American Revolutionary War” and ending in the early years of the twentieth century. As finally executed, Lawrence’s Struggle series of panels (1954–1956) extended chronologically from the 1770 Boston Massacre to the aftermath of the battle of New Orleans in 1815. Lawrence thereby placed the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 at the center of the path to American nationhood.
The American Historical Review · 2021
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Law
- History
Tamar Herzog’s A Short History of European Law is a wonderful new survey of European legal history that makes a highly technical and forbidding subject accessible to nonspecialists. It does so by recapturing the field of legal history as a terrain of contestation. There is contestation between lawyers over both the specific rules of law and the more general normative assumptions underpinning the legal order. And there is contestation among legal historians over the interpretation of such fundamental categories of the European legal past as Roman law, custom, and natural law. In a text that spans more than two thousand years, Herzog provides an insightful portrait of how and why the ground beneath European legal norms shifted repeatedly and dramatically over this long period. At the same time, she conveys just enough of the historiographical landscape to make clear why the scholarly interpretations of European law have themselves evolved and...
2020-07-21
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter considers the role of the late eighteenth-century creole jurist Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750–1819) as one of the most important architects of the French colonial archives. Moreau’s life project was based on the premise that mastery of legal and historical knowledge was the indispensable precondition of political order. Well before the revolutionary era, Moreau made it his task to impose an intellectual discipline over what he regarded as the more unruly aspects of colonial law and society, considering the disorganized state of the colonial judicial archives to be one of the primary reflections of the disorder affecting colonial society more generally. The fruits of his work were the six-volume Loix et constitutions des colonies françaises, as well as a massive manuscript archive comprising legal and non-legal sources for the study of slavery and creole life in prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue. The argument of this chapter is that Moreau’s legal arsenal was, however, more than a repository of primary sources but must be interpreted as a document in its own right, an attempt to identify the development of Saint-Domingue society with a legal project, which Moreau defined as créolité, in which law must be based on the foundation of local knowledge. Historians’ continuing reliance upon Moreau’s publications and archive suggests the need for greater self-awareness about the uncomfortably close relationship between Moreau’s imperial vision and contemporary scholarship.
The Mississippi Bubble in Saint-Domingue (Haiti)
2019-09-02
article1st authorCorrespondingThe Journal of Modern History · 2018-08-21
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingLaw and History Review · 2018-05-01
article1st authorCorrespondingRafe Blaufarb, The Politics of Fiscal Privilege in Provence, 1530s-1830s, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012. Pp. xiii + 312. $75 cloth (ISBN 978-0813219509). - Volume 36 Issue 2
Introduction: Slavery and Citizenship in the Age of the Atlantic Revolutions
2016-01-01 · 2 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingSince the end of the Second World War, scholars have been searching for ways to compare the nature and impact of the Atlantic revolutions. It is a truism that the period between 1 763 and 1 825 the era of the American, French, Haitian and Spanish-American revolutions witnessed the creation of nation-states in the Old and New Worlds alike. Therein lies the period's interest for historians concerned either with the process of nation-building generally or with the formation of one or more nations specifically. More often than not, these scholars have tried their hand at comparing the
Frequent coauthors
- 2 shared
Daniel Gordon
Edge Hill University
- 2 shared
The Editors
- 1 shared
Erica Caple James
- 1 shared
Tamara Loos
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
- 1 shared
Len Scales
- 1 shared
Kathleen Neils Conzen
- 1 shared
Ellen Welch
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
- 1 shared
Jon Gjerde
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