In the Predatory Sea, Schmitt constructs the seventeenth-century Caribbean as a space whose dominant logic was not stable jurisdiction but predatory opportunity. She depicts a regime of mobile, multitiered, and interimperial coercion in which “traffickers”, her primary analytical term, transformed navigation into an economy of capture. This reframing is analytically generative, though some of its conceptual and territorial implications warrant closer scrutiny.

In the historiography of the early modern Caribbean, the seventeenth century has often been depicted as a turbulent interregnum, a mere prelude to the rise of the sugar plantation. Schmitt challenges this teleological approach, arguing that slavery and trafficking were not late-stage byproducts of agro-export economies but rather foundational to the English and French presence in the region. She contends “practices of slavery were embedded legally, economically, and socially in the English and French Caribbean from the very beginning” (11), giving shape to a “predatory sea” where the human body became a decisive resource for illicit trade, warfare, and colonial survival.

One of Schmitt’s key contributions is her entangled archival methodology. To counter the scarcity of English and French records prior to 1660, she mines Spanish colonial collections and historiography, sources often underutilized by anglophone historians, to reconstruct a transimperial space of porous borders and overlapping jurisdictions inhabited by Indigenous, Africans and Europeans. By treating archives not as transparent windows but as mediated fragments, she engages directly with contemporary debates on historical “silences.” This reflexivity sets the stage for her analysis of “serial displacement.” Through the lives of Francisco Biafra, Gaspar de Espinosa, and Catalina Angola, Schmitt demonstrates how captives served as strategic informants whose coerced testimonies fueled military raids. In this “predatory” logic, violence itself became a market incentive. Angola’s trajectory is particularly haunting; her life illustrates how racialized vulnerability became intergenerational, as the constant threat of invasion dictated the freedom, or lack thereof, of her children. Ultimately, Schmitt positions the seventeenth century as a period defined by its own devastating dynamics of enslavement, independent of the later plantation complex.

Schmitt examines the formalization of trafficking through the Asiento of 1662 and its effects throughout the second half of the seventeenth century to argue that metropolitan efforts to regulate commerce, such as the Grillo and Lomelín contracts, failed to mitigate regional violence. Indeed, these legal frameworks “did not make the Caribbean any less predatory during the 1660s” (140). Instead, the friction between monopolistic companies and informal intermediaries, exacerbated by conflicts such as the Second Anglo-Dutch War, only intensified the precarity of African-descendant populations. In this context, capture became a practice legitimated by war. Ultimately, Schmitt offers a nuanced reading of how institutional reform and Atlantic markets produced vulnerability, resisting the tendency to view slave expansion as a mere derivative of abstract “economic” demand.

Schmitt further decenters the traditional Anglo-American narrative by reinterpreting the arrival of Africans in Virginia in 1619. Rather than an exceptional rupture, she frames this event as an extension of consolidated Caribbean practices, effectively integrating North America into a broader system of racialized commodification, coercive mobility, and legal contestation. The story of Salvador Francisco de la Peña provides a poignant conclusion, encapsulating the book’s central thesis: The Caribbean was “an entangled space of competing jurisdictions and polities shaped by violence and racialized vulnerability” (204–205). Through such individual trajectories, Schmitt illuminates the structural transformations of the seventeenth-century Atlantic.

That said, the book’s emphasis on the fluidity of the “predatory sea” could benefit from greater precision regarding Indigenous territorialities. Schmitt does not ignore this issue; she demonstrates how Indigenous sovereignties, particularly in the Lesser Antilles, conditioned European settlement and structured alliances. However, because the narrative privileges circuits of mobility (capture, transfer, flight, and recapture), it does not always maintain Indigenous territorial politics as a sustained analytical axis. While Schmitt shows that Indigenous sovereignty dictated where traffickers could anchor or trade, keeping this territoriality more consistently in view would have sharpened our understanding of the “predatory sea.” It would reveal the dynamic not just as an expansive imperial force but also as a marker of the limits of imperial projection when confronted by robust local political systems.

Similarly, while the concept of “trafficking” is an analytically powerful tool for unifying disparate phenomena, its breadth risks a certain conceptual flattening. Schmitt effectively shows that vulnerability was shaped not only by race but also by corporate, religious, and military statuses. However, the work would benefit from a more explicit organizing typology to distinguish between various modes of predation: rescate (captivity for ransom), informal servitude, legally contested enslavement, and the consolidating regime of racialized slavery. Such a distinction would not undermine the book’s thesis; rather, it would strengthen it by pinpointing exactly how and when “predation” crystallized into stabilized forms of domination.

The Predatory Sea provides a crucial vantage point for understanding the early Atlantic. Beyond merely critiquing the teleology of the plantation, Schmitt reconstructs the era’s own coherent logic: a system where the Caribbean was defined not by the promise of future agricultural stability, but by the immediate, violent, and interimperial mechanics of capture. In doing so, she restores the seventeenth century to its own distinct historical frequency, offering a transformative framework for how we conceptualize the origins of racialized slavery and imperial power.