Erb Memorial Union
Maple Room
1222 E. 13th Ave.
“Power, Capitalism, and Race from Creek Country to the Florida Borderlands, 1765-1842”
Feather Crawford’s historical research focuses on a time when economic and political power was up for grabs in the North American Spanish borderlands and trade with Native Americans was the key to uncontested sovereignty over Florida. Her research will explain how economic interactions between Spanish and English colonialists and Creek and Seminole Indians influenced relationships of power between the European colonizers, Native Americans colonial subjects, and the U.S. nation-state. This project will explore the evidence that the Creek and Seminoles Indians who claimed the Florida borderlands derived political and economic power from what she is calling folk capitalism. Folk capitalism was a strategy of economic engagement with European colonialists that was developed and deployed by Creeks and Seminoles in response to conditions of colonial expansion and opportunities to preserve and accumulate social and material capital.
Feather Crawford, a PhD candidate in history, is the recipient of a 2013 CLLAS Graduate Research Grant.