Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina. By Stuart B. Schwartz (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015) 439 pp. $35.00

Sea of Storms explores how for the past five centuries, people have understood and responded to hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean—the diverse island and coastal societies centered in the Caribbean Sea and linked by Atlantic histories of colonialism, slavery, and nation-making. The book’s sweeping coverage, together with its focus on shared environmental conditions and hazards, is an effort to overcome the linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries that typically frame histories of the region. Schwartz’s primary concern is the social dimensions of hurricanes—the changing concepts of nature and the divine that have shaped perceptions of storms and efforts to deal with them, and the social and political conditions that have influenced the impact of hurricanes in distinct locales and across time. Toward that end, Schwartz offers transnational comparisons and interconnections rather than discrete local or national histories, and he draws from the latest meteorological and oceanographical research to enrich his narrative...