Fish,politics and protectionism since c.1750: Introduction

No industries in a developed economy escape the notice of government, and almost all pose problems for policymakers and administrators, in terms of how they should be regulated, sustained, supported and developed. Fishing is perhaps uniquely problematic in this respect. This is firstly because it is the last industry to rest upon the hunting of wild, living creatures: access to the hunting grounds must be secured, and the effort expended there must be controlled to ensure that something is left for future generations to harvest. Secondly, it is because many of the regulatory issues fisheries policymakers and administrators must tackle are inherently international in nature, for much fishing effort is expended on the high seas or off the shores of other states. Thirdly, it is because in many countries fisheries have been regarded as strategically important providers of food, and of vessels and skilled labour for navies in wartime. ¹

These international dimensions to the regulation of fisheries have existed for almost as long as states with the capability to define and to assert control over their adjoining seas. As Elizabeth Nyman’s contribution points out, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas sought to resolve a thorny debate over the rights of individuals and states to use and control the seas dating back to the seventeenth century. That debate seemed to have been settled during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in favour of Mare Liberum, albeit with the caveat that states could exert control over a narrow coastal strip of sea. ² The question, as her contribution relates, was thrown open again by rapid developments in fishing and offshore mineral resource extraction early in the twentieth century, creating the need for a new settlement which finally arrived, in the form of UNCLOS III, in 1982.

Of course, the road to UNCLOS was not a smooth one. Conflicting interests between users of the seas were legion and defied easy resolution, as they still are and do. Johanna Sackel’s contribution discusses how different resource narratives were used to support two very different stances. Firstly, there was that of the German deep-sea fishing industry, which sought to protect its longstanding but threatened access to deep-sea fishing grounds, dressing this up in arguments about the ‘common economic good’ of humankind. This conflicted directly with the growing conservationist movement of the 1970s, and also with a 1970 United Nations resolution which referred to the sea’s resources as part of humankind’s ‘common heritage’, implying a commitment to conserve them for the future. Here, in a microcosm, is one of the key issues with fisheries policy and management: whose interests should be prioritised? How should the largely incompatible objectives of catchers, consumers, conservationists and others be reconciled on a global scale?

No other industry of a comparable size to fishing throws up such complex resource management issues. Yet fishing also poses many of the same problems to national governments as a range of other activities, especially in terms of how best to develop the industry and to support it in times of depression. Alison Reiser’s contribution discusses British fishing subsidies in the eighteenth century, and the argument of Adam Smith that the tonnage bounties in force at that time acted to retard rather than support the industry’s development. The reformed subsidy system subsequently introduced coincided with a change in the distribution of the herring shoals and thus much larger catches. By the time bounties were withdrawn altogether the industry was on a firmer footing, but even then government retained a substantial presence through the award of the ‘crown brand’, a marker of quality which helped to maintain British-caught herring’s place in key export markets for the next century. ³ When those were lost, government intervention of a more active kind – in the form of the Herring Industry Board and its programme of grants and loans, research and development and publicity – was needed to re-equip the industry and fit it for the changed conditions of the twentieth century. ⁴

Among those changed conditions was the collapse between the wars of the liberal, free-trading order of the nineteenth century. Fish was just one – and a small one – of countless commodities for which many countries introduced import tariffs in an effort to protect their domestic industries’ markets. Piers Crocker’s article relates how the Norwegian canned fish export industry was affected by import tariffs introduced in its largest market, the United States, and subsequently how it mounted a successful fight back from the 1920s onwards.

That response was achieved in part by exploiting the loopholes in successive rounds of tariffs, and serves as a reminder that, whatever rules are put in place, human ingenuity will generally find a way to circumvent them. Fishers are no exception. Yet it also serves as a reminder that legislators are always shooting at moving targets, and that regulations which make complete sense at one time may cease to do so when conditions change. This brings us back to Elizabeth Nyman’s article, which highlights how even so comprehensive a legal framework as UNCLOS reflects the circumstances of its times and the assumptions of those who drew it up. Piracy was regarded as a problem from the past in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and therefore UNCLOS has been of little help in dealing with resurgent piracy in the Straits of Malacca and the Indian Ocean.

The articles presented here arise from papers delivered to a joint conference of the North Atlantic Fisheries History Association and North American Society for Oceanic History, which was held in Portland, Maine, in May 2016. That conference examined a range of maritime and fisheries history themes, one of which – the complex and under-researched nexus between fisheries, policymakers and other stakeholders – forms the subject of this Forum. ⁵