Alexia Yates

2022 Mexico City

Abstract: Haiti, the first colonial territory to abolish slavery and achieve independence (1804), is also a near classic example of underdevelopment and neocolonialism (Joachim, 1979). France’s recognition of Haitian independence in 1825 included an enormous indemnity payment that transformed former colonial property in people and land into a national debt. From mid-century to the financial collapse that served as premise for Haiti’s occupation by the US in 1915, French creditors extracted an average of 5% of the country’s annual national income in payments (Piketty, 2020). This level of extraction demanded incredible amounts of individual and institutional labour, over long periods of time, on both sides of the Atlantic. It also relied on and reproduced persistent – occasionally spectacular – levels of violence. This paper examines the Haitian loan – first launched in 1825 but renewed in 1875 – in order to pose and answer questions about the elaboration of a legal regime for international investment; where this investment and its agents intersected with the construction of the imperial nation-state; and how ordinary people, from significant capitalists to small investors, shaped this process. Assessing the work of Haiti’s French creditors, it argues that investment in the former colony enabled individual investors to make claims upon the French government and provided a public context for the state to work out the nature of its postcolonial economic relations and responsibility for foreign investment. In practical terms, the Haitian loan helped institutionalize legal and political principles, as well as institutions like bondholder associations, that were foundational to France’s economic imperialism throughout the nineteenth century (Todd, 2021). More broadly, through decades of mobilization, Haiti’s creditors (banks and individual bondholders) engaged themselves and the French public in practices that imagined and argued about the value of that imperialism.

2022 Mexico City

Abstract: This paper will discuss the way that finance and lottery interpellated discursively and materially in nineteenth-century France, not only to police the boundaries of licit finance but to provide anchors and contexts that normalized and routinized novel financial practices. In the process, we construct a more diverse history of the kinds of market actors constituted by modern finance, and broach how we might begin to think of these ordinary actors – their wants and desires – as playing a part in reformatting the financial market in the first age of global capital.

2026 London

Abstract: One of the most important archives of modern French business history is housed at the Archives Nationales du Monde du Travail and is comprised of the collections of France’s first national bondholder association, the Association Nationale des Porteurs Français de Valeurs Étrangères (hereafter ANPFVE). This French counterpart of the British Corporation of Foreign Bondholders was founded in 1898 with the aim of fostering and supporting French foreign investment. The ANPFVE established a substantial library and archive on domestic and foreign enterprises, on which basis it informed investors and advocated for their interests at home and abroad. This paper will draw on membership records and other sources to examine the significance of this body as a mediator and co-producer of ‘French capital’, and argues that this association represents a milestone in the emergence of French rentiers as a class in and for itself. Indeed, starting from the 1860s, the mobilization of numerous rentier activists—such as the political economist, statistician, and journalist Alfred Neymarck—played a decisive role in domesticating foreign investment within French society and in fostering a form of class consciousness. We then turn to the ANPFVE archives to analyze the political agenda of its members—some of whom were genuine businessmen who specialized in bondholders advocacy and engaged in an intense lobbying enterprise. We demonstrate that their activities systematically oscillated between demands for governmental support abroad in the name of national interest and efforts to secure autonomous action that would insulate international investment from political interference—an approach that, in certain respects, foreshadows late twentieth-century phenomena such as vulture funds and Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS).