If you love sea turtles, this book might break your heart. As with so much of environmental history, it is a sobering reminder that humans have a long history of exercising predation upon other creatures, and that the turtles of the Caribbean were no exception. However, even knowing in advance that the turtles do not fare well, this book deserves attention because is exceptionally well written and argued.

The author tells a multilayered story centered around the fishing or hunting of the green turtle (and the hawksbill turtle and others), from the Cayman Islands through the entire Caribbean Sea, including tiny islands as well as the coasts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The narrative expands from the geographic waterscape to the political arrangements that shaped the hunt from colonial times into the late twentieth century, a couple of hundred years. As the men who hunted the turtles extinguished their prey in the British colonies, their forays led them further and further into waters and territories claimed by various independent nations, including Colombia, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. In fact, the author convincingly argues that the activity of the Caymanians spurred those governments into paying more attention to boundaries and where they wanted to mark them.

In other words, poor fishermen from poor British colonies had a role in the difficult task of state formation undertaken by several Latin American countries. After all, what is a state if it cannot define and defend the borders it proclaims to contain? Conflict over the hunting and fishing rights of British subjects in the greater Caribbean, in fact, became part and parcel of defining nationhood or empire for all of the countries mentioned above. And while England did not want to create ill-will among Latin American governments over the fate of a few hundred men of color plying the waters of the Caribbean in small boats chasing turtles, when they had continental imperial policy to worry about, it was the demise of the turtles that ultimately settled the matter. In the 1970s, the biggest consumer of all things turtle, the United States, bowed to conservationists’ pressure and declared the green turtle an endangered species, effectively collapsing the market and putting the turtlemen out of business once and mostly for all.

In telling that story, Crawford introduces us to a rich history. Caribbean colonial possessions were not all about sugar. Indigenous peoples could and did overtax their ecologies and engage in overfishing, as they did in this case. Formerly enslaved men of color accumulated expert maritime and ecological knowledge over centuries that ultimately informed scientific efforts to prevent the total extinction of the green turtle. As a labor force in a commodity chain forged across both mercantilism and capitalism, turtle hunters never escaped the poverty that engulfed dark-skinned peoples throughout the continent, even as they provided European and American elite banquet tables with exotic turtle soup for decades.

Although the text is short, Crawford covers a lot of ground. I only wish she had managed to dip her toes into questions about masculinity and its cultural expressions in this overwhelmingly male trade and milieu. I also wish she had speculated a little about “sustainability” and what the turtle fishery might tell us about its many definitions. But no book can cover everything and this one does an excellent job of showing how a very small group of poor men of color had a big presence in a corner of the ocean amid giants of the sea (turtles) and imperial giants alike.