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

FAIN: HB-281905-22

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

Research and writing leading to a book on prisoners of war and their role in imperial competition in 18th century British and Spanish America. 

Captive Exchanges addresses themes of warfare and incarceration as well as empire and cultural contact in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. 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 the Caribbean and Spanish Florida. This monograph uncovers the 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. British, Spanish, and French agents of empire, enslaved Africans, and Indigenous people from throughout the southeast experienced captivity in culturally specific and shifting ways. Investigating the impact of intelligence-gathering by prisoners reveals networks of information inadvertently created by captives and officials on the edges of empire.