The Torrid Zone

The first comparative history of European settlers’ trading, pirating, and colonizing activities in the Caribbean. Brimming with new perspectives and cutting-edge research, the essays collected in The Torrid Zone explore colonization and cultural interaction in the Caribbean from the late 1600s to the early 1800s—a period known as the “long” seventeenth century—a time when these encounters varied widely and the diverse actors were not yet fully enmeshed in the culture and power dynamics of maste