Society & Culture
Dean Michael Horswell engages in conversation with FAU's Associate Professor of American History, Adrian Finucane, PhD on her upcoming book Captive Exchanges: Prisoners of War and the Trade in Secrets, 1700-1760, which addresses themes of warfare and incarceration as well as empire and cultural contact in the 18th-century Atlantic world. The work 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. Captive Exchanges speaks to current scholarly concerns about alternative histories of warfare and carceral studies, as well as historiographical debates about the extent of power held by imperial states and the amount of interconnection that developed among people who lived precariously on the borders of these empires.