Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice

Arielle Alterwaite is a historian who studies slavery, emancipation, and political economy in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe with a particular focus on France and its empire. Her research broadly explores how financial speculation and sovereign debt shaped imperial expansion and became key elements of the early modern and modern world. Before coming to Brown, she defended her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently working on a book manuscript that addresses the specific case of the 1825 Haitian Indemnity, the debt imposed by France on Haiti as a condition for recognizing its sovereignty. The project uses manuscript, published, and material sources from more than thirty public and private archives and libraries in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean to tell a new, archivally grounded history of finance and empire. In it, she takes the particular case of Haiti's sovereign debt in the long nineteenth century and argues for the international significance of the debt for private banks, monetary systems, nation-making, abolitionist programs, and political thought in Europe and the rest of the world.

Insofar as Alterwaite’s work is broadly engaged with global conversations on reparations, representation, and repatriation, she is also interested in curatorial and artistic practices that link the economic histories of slavery and emancipation to the visual cultures of modernity. Her writing about art and history has been published in The American Historical Review, History and Theory, and Slavery & Abolition, among other fora.