"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) "In The Predatory Sea, Casey Schmitt exposes captivity as central to the colonial Caribbean's development. Captivity could befall anyoneenslaved 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, 16191807) "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, 15701640)
