Sharika D. Crawford, Associate Professor, Department of History, United States Naval Academy, will lead a discussion of a chapter from her book The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

In this workshop, participants will explore the southwestern Caribbean, a region that includes small islands and coastal communities at the edge of multiple modern-day nations. Drawing on a long seafaring tradition, men from the Cayman Islands increasingly turned to the sea rather than the land to eke out a livelihood. Their hunt for green and hawksbill turtles, however, grew contentious. Hunting grounds became difficult to access when aspirant nations enacted legislation to regulate or even restrict them from these spaces. In discussing The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean, we will explore how efforts to draw maritime boundaries, protect marine animal resources, and nationalize territorial waters became a way to integrate peripheral spaces into the nation for strategic and fiscal reasons. Yet such cases may also reveal how turtlemen leveraged and resisted state efforts to disrupt an extractive economy that bound them to a range of far-flung places through commercial and familial ties. 

This event is part of a series titled "The Limits of Networks in World History: Peripheries and Beyond."

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