The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean
Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making
By Sharika D. Crawford
216 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 7 halftones, 2 maps, 1 table
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6021-9
Published: October 2020 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-6020-2
Published: October 2020 -
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-6022-6
Published: October 2020
Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges
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Crawford describes the colonial Caribbean as an Atlantic commons where all could compete to control the region’s diverse peoples, lands, and waters and exploit the region’s raw materials. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Crawford traces and connects the expansion and decline of turtle hunting to matters of race, labor, political and economic change, and the natural environment. Like the turtles they chased, the boundary-flouting laborers exposed the limits of states’ sovereignty for a time but ultimately they lost their livelihoods, having played a significant role in legislation delimiting maritime boundaries. Still, former turtlemen have found their deep knowledge valued today in efforts to protect sea turtles and recover the region’s ecological sustainability.
About the Author
Sharika D. Crawford is associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.
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Reviews
“This may be the first book to consider marine animals—mainly the green and hawksbill turtles—as an organizing principle to examine society and empire. Bringing the humble turtle into conversation with state power and control, Sharika Crawford takes you on the ships and into the hunt to investigate the ideas, people, and commodities that so intimately connected a diaspora of animal-seekers and their communities. These men and these turtles reshape how we think about the slippery interfaces between humans and the sea, societies and animals, the Caribbean and the world.”—Emily Wakild, Boise State University
“Compellingly explores Caribbean turtlemen’s social and economic roles from the colonial era to the early twentieth century. Combining environmental and labor history with commodity studies, Crawford shows how the survival of sea turtles and the working people whose livelihoods depended upon increasingly endangered species became intertwined within the fragile ecology of the Caribbean.”—Jennifer L. Anderson, Stony Brook University