The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Colonialism is often imagined as an imperial project organized by officials at the highest levels of the state. For the earliest English and French colonies in the Caribbean, nothing could be further from the truth. 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 throughout the Caribbean. Raids against coastal communities and regional shipping in the region 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, The Predatory Sea offers a fresh perspective on how captivity and maritime violence shaped early English, French, and Dutch settlement. Drawn from sources across imperial archives, the book 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. 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.

About the speaker
Casey Schmitt is an Associate Professor of History at Cornell University where she researches and teaches on early modern colonization, mobility, empires, and slavery. Her work has appeared in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Early American Studies, and the William & Mary Quarterly and she has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Cornell Center for Social Sciences among others.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies