Join Dr. Adrian Finucane as she discusses her latest book exploring the relationships between the British and Spanish empires through the slave trade in the early eighteenth-Century Caribbean.
The British and the Spanish had long been in conflict, often clashing over politics, trade, and religion. But in the early decades of the eighteenth century, these empires signed an asiento agreement granting the British South Sea Company a monopoly on the slave trade in the Spanish Atlantic, opening up a world of uneasy collaboration. British agents of the Company moved to cities in the Caribbean and West Indies, where they braved the unforgiving tropical climate and hostile religious environment in order to trade slaves, manufactured goods, and contraband with Spanish colonists. In the process, British merchants developed relationships with the Spanish—both professional and, at times, personal. The Temptations of Trade traces the development of these complicated relationships in the context of the centuries-long imperial rivalry between Spain and Britain. .
$11 per person
Please direct all questions about this event to Susan Oyer at susanoyer@gmail.com.
Adrian Finucane is an Associate Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2011. Her first book, The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2016. It explores the close, sometimes cooperative relationships between agents of the British and Spanish empires through the slave trade in the early eighteenth-Century Caribbean. She is currently working on a book project about prisoners of war in the eighteenth century Americas. She has held fellowships through the John Carter Brown Library, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.
