In The Torrid Zone, Lou H. Roper and the volume's contributors encourage scholars “to consider the ‘long’ seventeenth-century Caribbean in an organic, transnational, holistic way that incorporates the diverse array of actors involved” (3). While the Spanish Empire dominated the Caribbean during the seventeenth century, this volume instead turns its focus to indigenous interactions, early settlement and imperial development, and military and commercial competition between the Danish, Dutch, English, and French empires. At the heart of The Torrid Zone lies two fundamental questions: “What made the Caribbean the Caribbean?” and “To what degree—and why—was the history of the Caribbean from circa 1580 … distinctive from that of other parts of the Americas?” (3).

Roper observes that very little historical analysis has “concentrated on seventeenth-century Native-European relations in the Caribbean”, which is especially notable as Native people's “enduring and significant territorial, diplomatic, and cultural influences … have faded from view” (3). In Part I, Tessa Murphy, Carolyn Arena, and Sarah Barber's contributed essays present significant initial steps in filling this lacuna. Murphy, Arena, and Barber's emphasis on Native American agency and the reality that “much of the region remained outside of European control” provides a reminder that European domination was not “a foregone conclusion any more than it was elsewhere in the Americas” (3-4). In the opening chapter, Murphy demonstrates that indigenous groups employed their own colonization strategy as they migrated to areas unsettled by Europeans, and they exploited an array of military and diplomatic tactics that delayed European domination of the Lesser Antilles well into the eighteenth century. Arena's contribution expounds upon Caribbean natives’ commercial relationships with the English and Dutch at Suriname from the 1630s to 1650s, and how Anglo-Dutch conflicts during the mid-seventeenth century facilitated the slave trade, Native-African slave rebellions, African-European-Native relations, and provided a grounding for Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. Heated and violent Native-European confrontations, as Barber's essay illustrates, fueled English and French colonists’ fears of “fierce Caribs”, and shaped how rival European powers and colonial officials employed Native-European alliances as tools to oppose neighboring claims, denigrate opponents, and consolidate power and influence in the Caribbean (5).

Colonial settlement and imperial warfare between competing European powers form the central themes of Part II's essays. Jessica Vance Roitman explores Dutch struggles to colonize Suriname and the South American coast, and how English settlers’ sugar plantations at Suriname brought prosperity and success to the Dutch colony. Zijlstra and Weterings’ chapter shows how Dutch officials administered loyalty oaths to ensure defeated English planters would continue contributing to the Dutch settlements. Amanda Snyder and James Robinson both examine England's conquest and remaking of Jamaica. Snyder focuses on Oliver Cromwell's “Western Design”, and how Spain's inability to devise a defense for Jamaica enabled England to capture the island (7). The conquest of Jamaica serves as a microcosm that illustrates England's growing influence in imperial affairs, and Spain's declining power in the Caribbean after 1630. Robinson's contribution addresses English efforts to transform Jamaica's social and physical landscapes, which involved English settlers selectively incorporating Spanish and Taíno agricultural methods in their early attempts to expand plantation agriculture. Eric Gøbel's essay demonstrates that, despite its limited historical examination, the Danish Caribbean's settlement and economic development mirrored those of the English, French, and Dutch Caribbean colonies. Giovanni Venegoni's chapter on Saint Domingue's settlement by three principal groups—buccaneers, “flibustiers”, and planter “habitants”—illustrates how each group defined its boundaries, structure, and characteristics in a process that saw their emergence as “the main actors in a new process of exploitation and evaluation” (145).

The final three essays constituting Part III examine the trade networks and social, cultural, and political influence generated by colonists’ migration around the Caribbean basin. Laurie Wood's chapter, “The Martinican Model”, examines how a small number of “families with military backgrounds in the French West Indies” produced a “Caribbean-generated judicial elite” (150). Through Caribbean families’ concentrating legal knowledge and legal, institutional membership, while moving between judicial positions and family networks across the French Caribbean, Wood illustrates the insights that “pathways of knowledge transfer” hold for understanding the early modern Caribbean's development (161). Barry Stiefel's essay on the Jewish diaspora in the Anglophone Caribbean elucidates how Jews’ religious statelessness, tribalism, economic resourcefulness, and a “co-ethnic trade network that transcended geopolitical borders” enabled them to be viewed as an economic and political asset, which subsequently permitted them a degree of acceptance in European metropoles and colonies (162-163). In the concluding chapter, Roper explores seventeenth-century South Carolina's position as a “Caribbean colony”, rather than a North American one, to demonstrate settling Barbadian colonists’ role in shaping South Carolina into a black-majority slave colony (176).

While The Torrid Zone expands upon the established scholarship of Richard Sheridan, Richard Dunn, Jerome Handler, Sidney Mintz, and Eric Williams with new assessments, there are voices, perspectives, and interpretations that remain minimized or absent. The views of European colonial and imperial officials, colonial-gentry class, and men dominate both the essays’ discussions and the authors of the source material analyzed. The prominence of European and colonial officials and gentry, as well as women's and Africans’ limited voices, likely results from the lack of surviving primary source documents outside government archives. By focusing on exploration, diplomacy, warfare, and commerce in the early modern Caribbean, other forms of artistic, linguistic, and cultural exchanges are left underdeveloped that could illuminate the broader material and cultural aspects of European, African, and indigenous interactions.

Notwithstanding these issues, The Torrid Zone provides an insightful contribution, which brings forward new perspectives on the early modern Caribbean's settlement and development. The collected volume's strength rests in its broad thematic scope, which encompasses multiple aspects of the cultural, social, political, racial, and religious development of the seventeenth-century Caribbean across the English, French, Dutch, and Danish settlements. Overall, this volume's essays present new understandings of how competing European powers, ethnic and social groups, and entangled cultural interactions influenced the settlement and development of the seventeenth-century Caribbean.