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Repairing Damage: The Slave Ship Marcelin and the Haiti Trade in the Age of Abolition

October 16, 2020

Repairing Damage: The Slave Ship Marcelin and the Haiti Trade in the Age of Abolition

October 16, 2020

Between 1814 and 1831, French slave traders trafficked approximately 200,000 individuals. Among those, a small but still surprising number stopped over in Haiti on their return voyage after selling captives elsewhere in the Americas. Using the case of the brigantine the Marcelin as its prime example, this article shows how legitimate commodity trading with Haiti served as a cover for illicit French slaving in the era of slave-trade abolition.


“The story of the Marcelin illustrates the extent to which deception, opportunism, and chance were central to the illegal slave trade, and by extension to the modern globalized economy.”

– Mary D. Lewis


The article situates the Marcelin within a “second slave trade,” which emerged as European countries abolished the transatlantic trade on paper but continued it in practice. Because the second slave trade was illegal, it left a very limited historical trace. This article reconstructs its contours from fragmentary archival evidence, while arguing that, ultimately, the archive itself does violence to the history of the nineteenth-century slave trade.

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About the Author

Mary D. Lewis

Mary D. Lewis

Resident Faculty & Seminar Co-chair

Lewis has been awarded such major grants as the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. Lewis is presently beginning ...
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