In The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making, Sharika D. Crawford directs our attention away from conventional studies of plantations, enslaved Africans, and sugar. Instead, she positions turtles and maritime vernacular culture as drivers of Caribbean economic development and the demarcation of colonial maritime boundaries. This fascinating history follows the plight of Caribbean turtle fishers as they encountered a dwindling population of turtles and fishing sites in an ever-changing political, social, and ecological landscape. Crawford gracefully analyzes these micro and macro processes of the western Caribbean turtle industry through five thematic chapters that overlap chronologically. The chapters collectively recover the region's past beyond sugar and the plantation complex, chart how maritime employment framed the worldviews and offered a lifeline for these seafarers, and highlight how turtles and the human populations that hunted them played a central role in the construction of maritime boundaries and international regulatory systems. As a result, Crawford pulls these turtlers from the peripheries of Caribbean historical discourses into the larger context of Atlantic world history.Crawford suggests turtlers played a pivotal role in shaping coastal communities like the Cayman Islands, Providencia Island, and Miskitu settlements of Nicaragua as much as sugar or bananas in other regions of the Caribbean. As she analyzes the structure of the turtling industry, Crawford roots herself in both the frontiers of colonial expansion in the western Caribbean and in the European “metropolis.” She uses fascinating anecdotes, print media, diplomatic correspondence, and oral histories to elucidate the changes within the turtling industry and the external and internal forces that prompted those changes. The story of turtlers, much like those of enslavement and sugar, is a story of complex transformations that take place during the transition from traditional agrarian societies into modern industrial ones with local and global consequences. To chart these processes, Crawford places readers on the ship decks, marketplaces, and deep seas of the western Caribbean to deliver an intimate glimpse into the lives of turtle hunters and into a profession dating back to the pre-Columbus era.Crawford provides a profound examination of the harsh working conditions, diets, isolation, disputes, and hierarchies of ships and their crews. However, The Last Turtlemen neglects an in-depth examination of the social conditions facing these turtlers when they are not at sea. Missing from Crawford's narrative are discussions of the turtlers’ living conditions on land, and their political activity beyond maritime disputes. She also neglects the chance to expound on the debt peonage facilitated by untrustworthy vessel owners and greedy store owners that bares a stark similarity to sharecropping in the American South.In addition to the several perspectives voiced from ship captains, cooks, and governors, there is a scarcity of women's voices within the narrative. Women are briefly described as managers of their families who prayed for the safe return of their spouses, but readers are left to presume that female turtlers were rare, if they existed at all. Readers may wonder how women reacted to the arrests and imprisonments of their husbands who illegally fished in foreign waters to support them, and how life changed for women as the turtle industry soared and declined. These shortcomings may stem from the author's focus on grappling with the persistent dynamics of sovereignty, boundary making, and a fragmented turtle-fishing industry.The Last Turtlemen integrates the stories of the survival of sea turtles, and the working people whose livelihoods depended on the trade, into the history of the Atlantic world. Crawford refers to the region as a “Transnational migratory sphere” and insists that long-distance turtle fishing facilitated the creation of a dynamic contact zone of seafaring culture through cross-racial, ethnic, and class exchanges. This is especially observed in the historical actors encountering the turtling industry, from Christopher Columbus, to Olaudah Equiano, to Captain Edward Teach, better known as the pirate Blackbeard. In addition, the turtle fishers are portrayed as active participants within the history of the Atlantic world, who made conscious choices for their survival based on international economic forces. For example, as a result of an interwar slump in the turtle trade some turtlers reaped economic benefits from their expert navigation skills and knowledge of the Caribbean working as bootleggers, smuggling rum and whiskey into American ports. Crawford also highlights the formation of a transnational maritime community that supported its members in times of need following hurricanes, exchanged fishing techniques, and maintained both fraternal ties and hostile rivalries across national boundaries. These linkages are best highlighted in the maritime disputes, in which governments attempted to restrict the turtlers’ access to the waters their ancestors fished. In these disputes the turtlers raised questions of international maritime policy that affected not only their fishing territories but also the maritime enterprises of colonizing nations in Europe and fledging nation-states like Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica.The struggles of these turtlers are central to the text, but the question of dwindling turtle populations looms over political debates about terrestrial and maritime territorial limits. Crawford has difficulty reconciling the perspectives of turtlers securing their right to fish unmolested by foreign governments with those of turtles themselves, who routinely faced extinction. As Crawford concludes the text, the reader's sympathies abruptly shift to the turtles via Archie Carr's efforts to upend the turtle trade by securing an endangered classification rating for green turtles. Unfortunately, in the process the turtlers are no longer portrayed as the last generation in a centuries-long fishing tradition; instead they become poachers on the beaches leased for Carr's studies. Previous chapters suggested that the turtlers’ hunting on leased shorelines and foreign waters was justified by their right to fish the seas and shorelines of their ancestors. Here Crawford misses an opportunity to trace the twilight of the industry. While Crawford suggests a glimmer of hope, in actuality she offers readers the story of the turtle fishing industry's evolution, regulation, and ultimate demise. Nonetheless, Crawford must be commended for placing her extensive and fruitful research on display as she tells a wonderful story of how these marginal historical actors were a vital component to the Caribbean region. Sea voyages are obvious elements in the story of the development of capitalist structures in the Atlantic world, but Crawford tells it differently. In The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean, turtles and their most dangerous predators are posited as fundamental drivers of this process.