The Predatory Sea - (Early American Studies) by Casey Schmitt (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A new interpretation of captivity, human trafficking, and colonization in the seventeenth-century Caribbean

A century before the height of the Atlantic slave trade, early modern racialized slavery emerged through practices of captive-taking and human trafficking in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Caribbean. The Predatory Sea offers the first full-length study of this deeply entangled history of captivity and colonialism.

Between 1570 and 1670, a multinational assortment of privately funded ship captains, sailors, merchants, and adventurers engaged in widespread practices of captive-taking and human trafficking. Raids against coastal communities and regional shipping in the Caribbean ensnared multitudes, including free and previously enslaved people of African and Indigenous descent, who found themselves trafficked into slavery away from their communities of belonging. Beginning in the 1570s, their captors established maritime bases on small, strategically located islands throughout the region. Those anchorages served as temporary settlements for northern European traffickers decades before their respective monarchs sanctioned official colonies. Colonization thus started with practices of captive-taking and human trafficking, which remained central to the development of the first English and French colonies in the Caribbean.

Through extensive research in Spanish, French, and English archives in Europe and the Caribbean, Casey Schmitt offers a fresh perspective on how captivity and maritime violence shaped early English, French, and Dutch settlement. Reading across imperial archives, she also reveals the experiences of those ensnared in this trade. Many captives escaped to Spanish population centers, where they testified to officials about what they witnessed in early English, French, and Dutch colonies. Those testimonies informed a series of Spanish attacks on foreign settlements in the Caribbean over the decades leading up to the 1650s. As Schmitt argues, captives were cause and consequence of inter-imperial competition and warfare during this violent century of Caribbean history. This captive economy, as explicated in The Predatory Sea, shaped English and French colonization, inter-imperial competition, and the lived experiences of captives and their captors.

Review Quotes

"An engaging and highly original study, The Predatory Sea examines the evolution and continuity of slaving practices across imperial boundaries in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. Drawing productively on Spanish-language sources, Casey Schmitt addresses multiple and often contradictory historical forces that culminated in the trafficking of Africans and people of African descent, with particular attention to those processes' impacts on the lives of the unfree."-- "David Wheat, author of Atlantic Africa in the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640"

"In The Predatory Sea, Casey Schmitt exposes captivity as central to the colonial Caribbean's development. Captivity could befall anyone--enslaved Africans, Indigenous Kalinago people, or European sailors or settlers. Pirates, privateers, official armies, and ordinary settlers all raided and plundered one another routinely, stealing people as often as goods. Schmitt shows that such widespread captivity shaped policy and imperial strategy, while transferring knowledge and labor power between empires. The Predatory Sea requires a major shift in how we understand colonial growth in the early Caribbean, colonial-Indigenous relations, the origins of slavery in the Caribbean and North America, and the connections between piracy, privateering, and colonization."-- "Gregory O'Malley, author of Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807"

"This superb book transforms our understanding of the early Caribbean. Demonstrating rare gifts of archival sleuthing, Casey Schmitt places the politics of plunder at the very center of the region's history of colonization and trade. An impressive, important contribution."-- "Lauren Benton, author of They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence"

About the Author

Casey Schmitt is Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University.