Beyond the North Atlantic

Wilcox, Martin

Abstract

Opening paragraphs:
Fisheries have long been conducted over a wide geographical range. European fishers first exploited the cod stocks that live off Newfoundland in the early sixteenth century (Innis 1940: 11-2), by which time Icelandic waters had been fished by the English for a century. International trade in fish products was also established at an early stage, with ‘sack’ ships carrying fish processed in Newfoundland to southern Europe from the late sixteenth century (Candow 2009: 403). Nevertheless, although fisheries were a component of the Atlantic economy in its formative stages, there was virtually no movement beyond the North Atlantic on the part of north European states. Further south, however, Spain and Portugal deployed a proportion of their fishing effort in the South Atlantic. From the early sixteenth century, Spanish vessels prosecuted a successful fishery for tuna (Carmona and López Losa 2009: 262), and during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Spanish state supported attempts to find substitutes for salt cod, which included the salting of hake extracted from the waters off west Africa (López Losa 1999: 66). Even so, it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that fishers based in the North Atlantic region extended their fishing efforts to other seas and oceans on a significant scale.
This chapter examines such extra-regional activity in three stages. First, it identifies the reasons why expansion beyond the North Atlantic was limited before the second half of the twentieth century. An overview of the main developments in this business during the 1950-2010 period is presented in the second section, followed by a discussion of the reasons why expansion happened when and how it did. The main contention of the chapter is that the spatial extension of the North Atlantic fisheries after 1950 was driven by the rising global demand for food, and facilitated by organisational and technological changes in the catching and processing sectors of the business.

Citation

Wilcox, M. (2012). Beyond the North Atlantic. In D. Starkey, & I. Heidbrink (Eds.), A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries, Volume 2: From the 1850s to the Early Twentieth-First Century. Hauschild Verlag

• Publication Date: 2012
• Deposit Date: Mar 5, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 5, 2025
• Publisher: Hauschild Verlag
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries, Volume 2: From the 1850s to the Early Twentieth-First Century
• Chapter Number: 13
• ISBN: 9783897575127
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/5075416