Fireside Chat- The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean

REGISTER

Tuesday, October 7th at 7 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

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. Casey Schmitt’s The Predatory Sea (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) 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. 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. Reading across imperial archives, Schmitt also traces the experiences of those ensnared in this trade. 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.

Dr. Casey Schmitt is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University where she teaches classes on Early America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World. She received here Ph.D. from William and Mary in 2018 and was the 2018-19 Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies before joining the faculty at Cornell. Her articles have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Hispanic American Historical Review, and Early American Studies.

Hosted by the Program of Early American Economy and Society