Captive Exchanges: Prisoners of War and the Trade in Secrets, 1700-1760

FAIN: FT-278574-21

Adrian Finucane
Florida Atlantic University (Boca Raton, FL 33431-6424)

Research and writing two chapters for a book on the use of prisoners of war in gathering military and commercial intelligence in 18th century British colonies of the American southeast.

Captive Exchanges addresses themes of warfare and incarceration as well as empire and cultural contact in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. This monograph argues that prisoners of war acted as crucial conduits in the development of military and commercial intelligence in the long conflict between the growing British colonies of the southeast and Spanish Florida. It uncovers the varied experiences of prisoners of war before the codification of international laws about the taking and holding of captives. People seized by an enemy might be closely confined, subject to interrogation, allowed to wander freely or quickly returned to their countrymen. Colonial officials sometimes kept captives in enemy cities for weeks or months before freeing them to inevitably bring military information to their own lines. Investigating the impact of intelligence-gathering by prisoners reveals networks of information that were inadvertently created by captives and officials on the edges of empire.