Mary Lewis

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Mary Lewis is Robert Walton Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard, and Affiliated Faculty at the Harvard Law School. Her work has ranged from questions of immigrant rights in 20th-century France to the nature of French colonial rule in North Africa and the Caribbean since the late 18th century. Her current project, “The First French Decolonization,” examines the transformation of France’s Atlantic empire after the loss of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). She is interested in following the trajectories of people, companies, networks, and investments that abandoned Saint-Domingue/Haiti and in exploring the new business ventures, trading partners, and relationships that emerged in the century following 1804. At the same time, she also considers how the French government worked to maintain and expand slave-labor economies in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guyana for nearly another half-century. MORE >