Environmental History of Premodern Fisheries

The study of premodern fisheries is caught between two realities. Scholars have long known that fishing and seafood consumption were major activities across the world and constituted important economic, cultural, and alimentary parts of the human experience, yet the field has long been a niche specialty which remains underdeveloped and imbalanced. In part this reflects the difficulty of studying fishing before the industrial era. Premodern fishing has left few records (textual, archaeological, visual, oral) compared to food production on land. Fishers of all kinds resist visibility in various sources (often intentionally), and move, as their catch do, with the waves in unexpected ways. Fishing is therefore difficult to study through the lens of the state or nation, and requires careful attention to localized and everchanging ecological and climatological conditions. Furthermore, premodern fisheries history cuts across disciplinary lines. Historians have been far less interested in the topic than archaeologists and anthropologists, especially outside of the early modern Atlantic context. With this in mind, the reader will notice important imbalances within the field which continue to limit and shape understanding of premodern fisheries. The first is the overwhelming focus on European and North Atlantic fishing. Most fisheries scholars have worked within Europe on Europe, or on the colonial fisheries in the northwest Atlantic, in what is today Canada and New England. The history of fishing work in East or South Asia, or Africa, or the Indigenous Americas has received far less attention. The second imbalance is the focus on the early modern era, and in particular the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. Although a cluster of medieval Europeanists has refined our understanding of medieval fish consumption, the balance of work continues to be done on later eras. The third is a focus on a few high-profile species: cod and herring above all, followed by sardines, salmon, and tuna. Such pelagic fish certainly constituted the bulk of preserved food produced by Europeans in the premodern Atlantic, but we know far less about other marine species. Only recently has fishing been treated seriously as an environmental subject by historians. Until the period from 2000 to 2024 historical research on fishing emphasized economic, political, and social dimensions. Now scholars are finally examining the ecological, climatological, biological, cultural, and metaphysical ramifications of fishing across time and space. This reflects the broader rise of environmental history as a field, and the selection of works below is meant to highlight these more environmental approaches.