Contested Commons: Circular Migration and State Rights in the Spanish Circum-Caribbean

FAIN: FT-60678-13

Sharika D. Crawford
NAVY, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE (Annapolis, MD 21402-1300)

This project studies the circular migration of Caymanian turtle fishermen in the Spanish circum-Caribbean between 1850 and 1950. In particular, the study examines how multiple states (e.g. Colombia, Nicaragua, Spanish imperial, British colonial, and United States) responded to the turtlemen and what state actions reveal about concerns for territorial rights and mobile maritime resources. What claims did turtlemen make that threatened state authority over maritime resources, and why did state authorities take their actions seriously? What were the fundamental issues about territorial rights and maritime resources at stake? Finally, what can we learn about the role of migrants in either sustaining or disrupting claims to state authority?

Associated Products

A contact zone: The turtle commons of the Western Caribbean (Article)
Title: A contact zone: The turtle commons of the Western Caribbean
Author: Ana Isabel Márquez-Pérez
Author: Sharika Crawford
Abstract: Turtle fishing has a long history in the Caribbean. Early Caribbean accounts from New World sailors and adventurers noted an abundance of the marine reptile, which quickly became desired for its delicious meat and beautiful shell. Nowhere was the presence of sea turtle more pronounced than in the adjacent banks, cays, and reefs of the Western Caribbean, where Europeans also noted the abilities developed by the indigenous peoples of the region. By the mid eighteenth century, English-speaking inhabitants from the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Nicaragua, and the Colombian islands of San Andrés and Old Providence took to the sea in search of green and hawksbill turtles. In doing so, they created a robust maritime commerce and distinctive seafaring culture, which continues to exist in these communities. In this article, we argue that the turtle trade facilitated the creation and recreation of a dynamic contact zone of ongoing transnational and cross-cultural encounters among indigenous, European, and Afro-Caribbean inhabitants.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://ijh.sagepub.com/content/28/1/64.full.pdf+html
Primary URL Description: Sage Publishing's International Journal of Maritime History webpage
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Publisher: International Journal of Maritime History

Disputas Maritimas en el Caribe Colombiano: La pesca de tortuga en el archipielago de San Andres y Providencia, 1910-1930 (Article)
Title: Disputas Maritimas en el Caribe Colombiano: La pesca de tortuga en el archipielago de San Andres y Providencia, 1910-1930
Author: Sharika Crawford
Abstract: Turtle fishing has a long history in the Greater Caribbean, especially in the Colombian waters surrounding the archipelago of San Andrés and Providencia. This article focuses both on Colombian efforts to assert greater control over national frontiers and territorial waters as well as how these new regulations affected turtle fishermen in the Caribbean Sea. Using travel accounts, Jamaican, Colombian, and American newspaper accounts, diplomatic correspondence, oral history interviews, and secondary sources, my work has national and regional implications. I show how San Andrés and Providencia islanders as well as Colombian officials tried to defend their territory and maritime boundaries from real and imaginary threats. Their efforts were to restrict the extraction of marine resources as part of the Colombian government’s strengthening the nation-state in the Caribbean.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/doi/pdf/10.7440/histcrit66.2017.04
Access Model: open
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Historia Critica

The Last Turtlemen: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (Book)
Title: The Last Turtlemen: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making
Author: Sharika D. Crawford
Abstract: Illuminating the entangled histories of the people and commodities that circulated across the Atlantic, Sharika D. Crawford assesses the Caribbean as a waterscape where imperial and national governments vied to control the profitability of the sea. Crawford places the green and hawksbill sea turtles and the Caymanian turtlemen who hunted them at the center of this waterscape. The story of the humble turtle and its hunter, she argues, came to play a significant role in shaping the maritime boundaries of the modern Caribbean. Crawford describes the colonial Caribbean as an Atlantic commons where all could compete to control the region’s diverse peoples, lands, and waters and exploit the region’s raw materials. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Crawford traces and connects the expansion and decline of turtle hunting to matters of race, labor, political and economic change, and the natural environment. Like the turtles they chased, the boundary-flouting laborers exposed the limits of states’ sovereignty for a time but ultimately they lost their livelihoods, having played a significant role in legislation delimiting maritime boundaries. Still, former turtlemen have found their deep knowledge valued today in efforts to protect sea turtles and recover the region’s ecological sustainability.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469660219/the-last-turtlemen-of-the-caribbean/
Primary URL Description: University of North Carolina Press's website
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-4696-602

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