After studying at SciencesPo Paris, Thomas Mareite joined Leiden University to pursue his PhD, where he graduated in 2020 and thereafter worked as a lecturer. He became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen (2021-2023) as a member of the ERC project Atlantic Exiles: Refugees and Revolution in the Atlantic World (1770s-1820s). Since March 2023, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen in the Atlantic Exiles project. His first book, Conditional Freedom: Free Soil and Fugitive Slaves from the U.S. South to Mexico’s Northeast, 1803-1861 (Brill, 2022), explores the experiences of enslaved people who self-emancipated from U.S. slavery by seeking refuge in nineteenth-century Mexico. His current research project focuses on Havana and its hinterland as transimperial haven for refugees from the Greater Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions. It delves into the exile of colonial settlers to Havana and its hinterland between roughly 1791 and 1821. It presents how French- and Spanish-speaking refugees from Hispaniola (and the Caribbean more generally) sought refuge in the Cuban port city and its region in the shadow of the Haitian Revolution. It shows how differentiated and contested policies of asylum and assistance shaped the governance of exile in this growing imperial submetropolis and new transnational hub of refugee migration. Against the backdrop of the internal and international shockwaves unleashed by the French and Haitian revolutions as well as transatlantic warfare, it explores how exiled people stood both as injured party and agents of imperial competition.
