Sabine Cadeau

Sabine Cadeau is a historian of Modern Latin America and the Caribbean. Her research and teaching interests include the early modern Atlantic World as well as modern Latin American and Caribbean history. Her first book More Than a Massacre: Racial Violence and Citizenship in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands was published by the University of Cambridge Press Afro-Latin America series. The book traces a successively worsening campaign of explicitly racialized anti-Haitian repression that began in 1919 under the American occupiers, accelerated in 1930, with the rise of Trujillo, and culminated in 1937 with the slaughter of an estimated twenty thousand civilians. More than a Massacre reframes the 1937 Haitian Massacre as a genocide and demonstrates the importance of this event for understanding statelessness and citizenship in the twentieth century. In 2023 More than a Massacre was awarded the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award and the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide.

Her second manuscript, Bonds and Bondage: Financial Capitalism and the Legacies of Atlantic Slavery at the University of Cambridge is forthcoming with the University of Cambridge Press. This manuscript emerged from the commissioned University of Cambridge Legacies of Enslavement Inquiry that began in 2019. It is a study of the University of Cambridge’s multiple relationships with slave trading companies such as the East India Company, The Royal African Company, and especially the South Sea Company. This book illustrates the ways in which the University of Cambridge accumulated wealth from Atlantic Slavery through colonial financial instruments. Through this study she demonstrates that the University of Cambridge benefitted economically from enslavement at multiple levels and was transformed by the colonial capitalism of the early modern era in multiple highly visible ways.

Sabine is also currently preparing another monograph on the 1937 Haitian Massacre titled Victims in Their Own Words: Remembering the Forgotten 1937 Haitian Massacre. This book project builds on her oral history fieldwork on the 1937 Haitian Massacre and centers survivors’ detailed accounts and interpretation of the event.