Colonization and Conquest: British Florida in the Eighteenth Century; by Lawrence H. Feldman; iv + 277 pp.; Paperback; Published: 2007; Reprinted: 2009 ; ISBN 9780806353227; Item # CF9975D

Mr. Feldman is the author of two previous publications pertaining to pre-statehood Florida: (1) Anglo-Americans in Spanish Archives, a collection of census data on British-Americans who settled in Florida during the second period of Spanish domination (1784-1821); and (2)The Last Days of British St. Augustine, 1784-1785, the transcription of a Spanish census of the English colony of East Florida.

For this work Mr. Feldman has transcribed a variety of population lists for East and West Florida, dating from 1763 to 1784, based on British sources. Mr. Feldman discovered these records among the files of England's Public Record Office that had been copied for and deposited in the Library of Congress in the 1920s. These heretofore unpublished sources consist of lists of refugees, signatories to oaths of allegiance, lists of inhabitants, council members, militia, intra-Florida migrants, and more. Each list has the virtue of placing individuals in a specific location at a particular point in time. In some cases, the schedules also give a person's marital status, number of children, race, and/or occupation. For researchers hoping to further pursue the circumstances surrounding the Anglo-Spanish military campaign of 1779-1784, the author has added an extensive bibliography of sources. In all, this original title refers to roughly 3,000 English subjects who resided in East or West Florida before it was returned to Spain in the aftermath of the American Revolution. (For reasons of economy, since most of Mr. Feldman's lists are in alphabetical order, there is no index to the volume as a whole.)