Malick W. Ghachem

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Malick W. Ghachem is a historian, a lawyer, and an associate professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He works on the history of colonial slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, with a focus on Haiti (Saint-Domingue).

During his fellowship, Ghachem is completing a book titled “‘In the Name of the Colony’: The Revolt against the Indies Company in Haiti, 1720–1725,” which tells the story of the rise of the large-scale sugar plantation economy in Haiti through the lens of a creole rebellion against the monopoly slave-trading privileges of the French Indies Company. The book is a microhistory of a short but intensely consequential period of Haitian history and seeks to understand one of the major economic transformations of Haiti’s past from the shifting perspectives of white colonists (including women rebels), administrators, Jesuit missionaries, and slaves.

Ghachem earned his BA and JD from Harvard University and his PhD from Stanford University. He is the author of The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which received awards from the American Historical Association and Caribbean Studies Association, and has written widely on topics in American legal and constitutional history. Ghachem is a member of the Massachusetts Bar Association and the and New York State Bar Association.