Donovan Fifield

Donovan Fifield is a PhD student in History at the University of Virginia. He earned a BA in History from the University of Connecticut. He was an Adam Smith Fellow during the 2021-2022, and 2022-2023 academic years. His research investigates the relationship between merchant credit and public finance during eighteenth-century colonial wars in British North America. In his dissertation, he tentatively argues that the evolution of war contracting policies between 1688 and 1775 incentivized the overextension of private merchant debt and, eventually, contributed to American anti-imperial sentiment.