Abstract
In late eighteenth-century Britain, Adam Smith was the most influential thinker to offer advice on fisheries policy. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that subsidized, offshore fishing vessels were being built to catch subsidies, not fish. He argued that the tonnage bounties, intended to promote an export trade in herring, had instead raised local food prices and destroyed the Scottish small-boat fishery. This article describes the parliamentary inquiries this criticism joined, including whether public subsidies could help to build a British fishery at an appropriate scale. Speculating on the relative role of politics, geography and Enlightenment thinking in the parliamentary debate, it concludes that the herring itself made the public subsidies system succeed. The ‘Grand Shoal’ known in earlier decades reassembled along the Scottish coasts, and catches by vessels of all sizes increased dramatically. When, by 1799, British herring catches equalled the Dutch fishery at its peak, the ‘fickle’ herring made Adam Smith’s experiment in fish policy and politics a success.
[I]t has, I am afraid, been too common for vessels to fit out for the sole purpose of catching, not the fish, but the bounty.
The invisible herring
In 1784, Adam Smith (1723–1790), moral philosopher and leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, added ten paragraphs to the third edition of his already famous treatise, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The topic of the new paragraphs was herring, or, more specifically, the ‘tonnage bounty’ system. An element of British mercantilism, the bounties were the British Government’s means of promoting exports by paying subsidies to owners of busses – herring fishing vessels large enough to accommodate the men, barrels and salt needed for at-sea curing. Smith calculated the costs of producing a barrel of herring against its sale value for 1771 to 1782 to show that these subsidies had resulted in only a few thousand barrels of ‘merchantable’ herring at a cost to the government of several pounds per barrel. 1 In Smith’s view, ‘the legislature ha[d] been very grossly imposed upon’ by the entrepreneurs who sought the tonnage bounties. Moreover, the subsidy was aimed at an unsuitable type of fishing vessel and had raised the home-market price of herring, an important local foodstuff. 2
What Smith did not say, however, was that when he wrote these words, Westminster was actively reconsidering its vessel-subsidies policy. With the end of the American War of Independence and the loss of the overseas colonies, patriotic thoughts had turned to the undeveloped coasts of northern Scotland and the vast shoals of herring that periodically swarmed along them. 3 Through a parliamentary committee of inquiry, the British Government was again investigating the best means of achieving a long-overdue commitment, that of uniting the two kingdoms by subsidizing economic development in the Scottish Highlands. 4 Aware of this inquiry and of the impact of bounties on customs revenues, Smith tailored his addendum on the bounties to influence the direction of the policy reforms toward the small-scale, open-boat fishery and the home consumption of Scotland’s herring resource. In so doing, Adam Smith, the intellectual Scotsman who was more at home in Edinburgh than in London society, as illustrated in Figure 1, proved he was also a political animal. He was likely the first prominent social scientist to lobby directly for more enlightened fisheries policy.
John Kay’s 1787 cartoon of Adam Smith walking to the Edinburgh Customs House in a bubble of his own thought.
The object of the tonnage bounty was the buss, a sloop-type, driftnet fishing vessel specially adapted to catching and processing North Sea herring, a surface-feeding, schooling fish whose value Britain had recognized but not realized for centuries. 5 The buss was a decked vessel, an unfamiliar and disliked style of construction in Scottish fishing ports. 6 Despite numerous attempts at establishing British joint-stock companies to invest in such vessels, by the mid-eighteenth century, the buss fleet fishing for herring off Scotland was Dutch, not British. Neither legislative policies nor the naval engagements of earlier Scottish and English monarchs had kept the Dutch fishery away from its rendezvous with the herring shoals. 7
Wars were not the only challenge to fisheries. Early in the fifteenth century, a climate-related shift in the herrings’ migration brought the shoals to the Dutch coast of the North Sea, diminishing both the Scandinavian fisheries and the Hanseatic League’s commercial power. 8 Believing ‘Providence intended Holland to supply the world with herring’, a group of Dutch herring-fishing towns formed the College of the Great Fishery. 9 An organization of merchants and burghers with regulatory powers, the College sent a fleet of herring busses into the British seas, to catch and process herring as they gathered in annual rites along the Scottish isles and northern headlands. 10 Rather than pay taxes to the Dutch Republic for a naval escort, the College bought safe passage agreements from the British, and bound the merchant-burghers of Hamburg to a pact not to buy English herring before the late-June date set for the opening of the buss fishery. 11 By strictly regulating the curing method and materials employed on the busses, the College dominated the continental market for herring, 12 where demand was high to meet Lent and fasting-day strictures of the Catholic faith; as a result, as early natural histories of herring often noted, the city of Amsterdam was ‘built on the bones of herring’. 13
But Dutch rivalry was not the geopolitical fuel of British fisheries policy by the mid-eighteenth century. In 1707, Scotland entered into political union with Britain, and Westminster, not Holyrood, took control of its fishery legislation and development policies. By 1750, Ireland was recovering from famine, and British America was smuggling untaxed tea from the Dutch Republic to evade Britain’s import taxes and other mercantilist policies. Having recently demobilized troops who had suppressed rebellion in the Scottish Highlands, the British nation was in need of a new patriotic undertaking; reviving the British herring project seemed just the thing. 14 With parts of Scotland bordering the richest herring fishing grounds in the world, the Highlands were a favourite target for this strategy of ‘internal colonization through capitalism’. 15 In the Treaty of Union, Westminster had promised to subsidize a Scottish export fishery; after the union, it enacted numerous legislative acts to that end, most notably the act of 1750 authorizing the tonnage bounties. 16 But these laws had all failed, ‘merely succeed[ing] in antagonizing the many fishermen who operate on a small scale’ who did not qualify for such assistance. 17
To Adam Smith’s eyes, the flaw in Westminster’s policy was obvious; it made no sense to imitate the size and weight of the vessels used by the Dutch to fish for herring, not unless a fleet of large-tonnage vessels was the only way to supply British navies with a trained corps of able-bodied seamen. Moreover, an efficient, industrial fishery would not emerge until Parliament removed other protectionist legislation that hindered domestic herring fisheries. The salt taxes and import restrictions prevented Scottish merchants from improving the quality of the curing process to meet the standard essential for the continental market. Smith seemed to think a better policy would acknowledge the social value of the herring fisheries and the naturally occurring division of labour within them, and then to fashion subsidies accordingly. British patriotism should be directed toward increasing food security in the famine-prone reaches of the kingdom. Producing food for local trade rather than commodities for export was the real key to national wealth, and this policy would be served best by encouraging a small-boat fishery that could fish in the protected waters of northern Britain. 18
A few herring busses were in use in Britain’s waters at the time of the parliamentary inquiry, but in Fife, Adam Smith’s home district in southeast Scotland, local fishermen preferred to use undecked sailing vessels manned by a small crew, to catch herring as they returned to Scottish bays and sea-lochs for spawning. To increase the incentives to build busses for the so-called white-herring fishery, the Fishery Act of 1750 (Act 23, Geo. II, c. 24) had raised the tonnage bounty payments to 30 shillings per vessel-ton for vessels of 20 to 80 tons; then, London merchants successfully petitioned for a 50-shillings bounty in 1757. Within a few years, however, the bounties were back down to 20 shillings. 19 Some merchants invested in herring busses to supply the red-herring smokehouses of Yarmouth and Lowestoft. The Society of Free British Fisheries, the last royal fishing company, was incorporated in 1750 and built four busses before the company collapsed in 1772. In most of Scotland’s waters the bounty busses tended to function as support vessels for the open-boat fishery. 20
The Dutch used busses because the herring shoals were 600 miles or more from the ports on the eastern edge of the North Sea. Herring requires preservation by smoking or salting almost immediately upon capture if it is to be a marketable commodity. By inventing ‘gibbing’, a gutting and curing method, for use on the busses and closely supervising its application, the College of the Great Fishery cornered the market with the Dutch brand, and made the method’s purported inventor, Willem Beukels, a legend in Holland. 21 By shooting large driftnets from the bow and hauling them back in a workspace enlarged by lowering and resting the masts on the stern rail, the Dutch buss, as illustrated in Figure 2, was well designed to sustain an offshore, industrial herring fishery. Heavy and round-hulled, Dutch busses were big and nimble, but the fleet employed fast herring-jagers (yachts) to bring the product to market in Holland, allowing the busses to remain at sea. The busses began fishing in June off the Shetland Islands as the first herring shoals coalesced, and then travelled down the coasts of Scotland and England to capture spawning shoals gathering there, ending with the autumn fishery off the East Anglian coast and in the English Channel. 22
Dutch fishermen retrieving fish on board an eighteenth-century herring buss, with fast jagger (heering-yacht) heading for port.
War with Britain, further shifts in herring migrations, and competition from foreign fisheries all conspired to diminish the Dutch Republic’s great fishery. In Britain, it took a century of government inducements, including payment of bounties for both large and small vessels and on each barrel of cured herring, repeal of salt taxes, and curing specifications to ensure quality control, before the herring fishery reached the level of the Dutch fishery at its peak in 1799. 23 Nevertheless, academic opinion is divided on whether policy on subsidies and duties should be credited with this achievement or if environmental changes favouring Scottish fisheries were responsible. There is also no agreement among scholars on the role Adam Smith played in the eventual success of Britain’s herring project.
James Coull, the Scottish historical geographer of fisheries, concludes ‘there were obvious results of the bounties’ as early as late in the eighteenth century; during this period, however, there was always disagreement over whether the bounties were working. Adam Smith’s belief that they were not was part of this disagreement. 24 John Leazer, an American historian who closely analysed the costs and benefits of the British herring bounty system, finds that Smith mistakenly concluded that the tonnage bounties were a waste of money that had destroyed the small-boat fishery. The ten years of excise and bounties data Smith examined did not reflect the important changes Parliament made to the bounty policy in 1785 and especially in 1786. In that session, Parliament approved not only a major overhaul of the bounties, but the incorporation of The British Fisheries Society, a joint-stock company to encourage fisheries in the Highlands through private development of towns and canals. 25 Adam Smith had used the ten-year performance of an incomplete bounty system to ‘prove his case’ that herring bounties reflected the flawed logic of the mercantile system. Parliament’s revisions completed the mercantilist logic of the herring bounty system by inclusion of the packed-barrel bounty on herring intended for export. With this support, together with the tonnage bounties, vessel owners, especially of busses, could weather periods of warfare and low catch rates. 26
Analysis by the American political economist Ethan Kapstein, in a study of rural development politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, emphasizes the role of coastal geography which necessitated vessels, like busses, that could fish the open sea. The ‘seafront rises from the beach like some walled fortress’ in the West Highlands, unlike the east coast of Scotland, where herring were prevalent in the many inlets and accessible by small boats. Kapstein describes the disruption to fisheries brought by the onset of the American War of Independence: inflation, impressed naval service, and piracy all combined with poor herring runs to dampen the incentive effect of the tonnage bounties. 27 An historian of English sea fisheries, Michael S. Haines, argues that the degree to which the herring industry was helped by government measures is debatable, given the scale of foreign fisheries. He notes that although Parliament partially exempted herring fisheries from the salt taxes in 1786, applying for the exemption was time-consuming and costly, thus, very few vessel owners took advantage of the discount. By the time the salt tax was fully repealed, Haines concludes it was too late for Britain’s buss fisheries. In ‘terminal decline’, in English ports, busses were being overtaken by the less costly, two-masted sailing vessels called luggers, which delivered their catches to shore-side curing stations. Fortuitously, when Parliament finally addressed the salt issue and measures to improve the quality of the cure, it was the same year that the herring shoals disappeared suddenly from the Bohuslän coast of the Baltic, to the great detriment of the Swedish fishery, creating an opening in the continental market for the British herring. 28
Notwithstanding this debate, it is clear now that Adam Smith took credit, at least privately, for the legislation reforming the subsidies policy for British fisheries. Although Smith famously directed his executors to burn his notes and manuscripts upon his death, 29 Canadian historian David Raynor found two letters Adam Smith wrote to Henry Beaufoy between November 1786 and January 1787. Beaufoy, as will be discussed later, was the Member of Parliament who introduced reforming legislation for the fishery subsidies in 1786. This ‘Act for the more Effectual Encouragement of the British Fishery’ (26 Geo. III c. 81) reduced the tonnage bounty, made it payable to ships of any size, and created a per-barrel subsidy payable to anyone who cured and exported herring, large-vessel investors and small-boat fishermen alike. In the correspondence, Smith takes ownership and signals his continuing interest in the subsidies issue, telling Beaufoy: ‘I am very happy that you approve my Idea with regard to the Herring fishery. I have a great deal more to say to you on the same subject, which I shall probably take the liberty to do before the meeting of next session of Parliament’. 30
But this analysis begs the question: why did Adam Smith go to the trouble of adding four pages of criticism supported by a (highly selective) table of statistics to the third edition of his book, far more text than the one paragraph he devoted to his idea of an ‘invisible hand’? As a native of Fife, was he naturally inclined toward the local fishing vessels and the home consumption of herring? 31 Or had the customs data he evaluated in his capacity as an Edinburgh commissioner revealed the tonnage bounties to be the best way to illustrate the folly of the entire British commercial system? Smith believed he was working on the last edition of The Wealth of Nations that he would see in his lifetime. As he wrote to his friend William Strahan, the publisher of his first book, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘This Edition will probably see me out and I should therefore chuse to leave it behind me as perfect as I can make it. Some new arguments against the corn bounty; against the Herring buss bounty; …’ 32
This article finds support for the latter explanation. When Smith was able to break away from his duties on the Board of Customs and visit London in 1783, he met one of his admirers and a reader of The Wealth of Nations, Henry Beaufoy, an independent and reform-minded Member of Parliament from Great Yarmouth. 33 Smith understood that Westminster was constantly tinkering with the buss bounties but was unlikely to give them up entirely. Smith may have suggested to Beaufoy that he introduce a bill authorizing a subsidy for small-boat herring fishers instead of directing the Treasury to pour additional monies into the bounty busses. To ensure the boats actually caught fish, the bill could also create a premium to be paid on packed barrels of cured herring. Finding Beaufoy interested, and being deeply involved in revising the third edition for a general audience, Smith may have decided to lend his support for these measures in the text he was about to send to his publisher, Thomas Caddell. 34
Furthermore, Adam Smith corresponded with Henry Dundas, MP, former solicitor-general of Scotland and later Viscount Melville, frequently sending him names of men he was recommending for appointments. 35 Dundas was very interested in northern developments and was a close colleague of William Pitt. He introduced a resolution in March 1785 that the House of Commons appoint a committee to inquire into the state of British fisheries. 36 Dundas likely engineered the appointment of Henry Beaufoy to chair the committee. By July of that same year, Beaufoy had tabled four reports, including a scathing indictment of the salt taxes, and a detailed record of witnesses’ views of what was ailing British fisheries. By asking various witnesses what they thought of Dr. Smith’s criticism, which Beaufoy had reprinted entirely in the committee’s first report, Beaufoy used it as a foil for his own ideas on de-regulating the buss-bounty fishery and on establishing a new British Fishery Society. 37
The fickle herring
The idea of using financial subsidies to expand the offshore fisheries of northern Britain was especially appealing to those who believed that herring migrated in one great shoal, from the polar ‘North Seas’ to the British Isles. 38 In 1749, a previous parliamentary inquiry had studied the problem of unpredictable fisheries. The committee was told that a fleet of offshore busses would be most likely to catch the herring offshore, as soon as the shoal began to approach Britain, but before it split into two divisions and migrated along the west and east coasts. Interception on the high seas would obviate the need for accurate predictions of which embayment the ‘fickle’ herring would favour, and where they could be caught by the open-boat vessels launched from the shore. After the inquiry, Parliament enacted the 1750 ‘Act for the Encouragement of the British White Fishery’, which made the owners of herring busses eligible for an annual payment of 36 shillings per ton of vessel weight, with further premiums for the vessels that brought in the largest catches. After a series of poor catches, Parliament extended the bounty to 50 shillings per ton of vessel burden. But this change was insufficient to save The Society of the Free British Fishery, the latest in a line of chartered royal fishing companies, from bankruptcy. 39
Some Members of Parliament believed the principal goal of the tonnage bounties was not to produce herring, but to employ seamen and fishers in long voyages at sea. Thus, over time, Parliament enacted a number of restrictions designed to maximize the size of the crew and the length of the busses’ voyages: a requirement that all vessels rendezvous in one location before commencing the fishing season, a three-month minimum voyage length regardless of catch sizes, and a prohibition against purchasing fish cargo from other vessels and returning early to port. An obliging essayist of the day, James Solas Dodd, a former naval surgeon, later turned actor and essayist, justified these measures with a theory of herring migrations. In his Essay Towards a Natural History of the Herring, Dodd summarized the knowledge of the day on herring (see Figure 3), including the ‘polar migration’ theory, an early ecological understanding of why and when herring migrate. 40 In Dodd’s account, there was one great shoal, driven down out of the polar sea by enemies, led by a king or steering fish, and dividing into armies, legions, divisions, and troops, to spread throughout all the waters of the realm until something sent them back to their home under the ice. This same understanding would be repeated frequently over the next two centuries in the many pamphlets and prospectuses circulated by those who believed the key to Britain’s future prosperity was to build a Dutch-type deep-sea fishery for herring.
An eighteenth-century diagram of a herring.
When it was Henry Beaufoy’s time to lead a parliamentary inquiry, the Pitt government had recently hired Dr. James Anderson to tour northern Britain and to recommend the best means of extending the fisheries. 41 Anderson’s report to the Treasury made a number of recommendations, some of which were quite at odds with those of John Knox, another prominent advocate of rural development in Scotland, who had made 14 trips to Scotland to investigate ideas for improvement. Anderson emphasized the social and economic conditions that prevented rural inhabitants of Scotland from developing the nation’s fisheries. Rather than extending the tonnage bounties, it was more important to repeal the taxes on coal, which kept would-be fishers out in the countryside during the herring-rich summer months, collecting wood for winter fuel because they could not afford coal. Once their fuel needs were taken care of, the fishers would become productive if the government offered enticing premiums for the largest catches to the small-boat and buss-bounty fisheries respectively. Premiums would engender a healthy competition among the towns, leading to high catches and low prices. 42
Anderson did not believe in permanent bounties; they were needed only until the other infrastructural improvements bore fruit. John Knox, on the other hand, who had made several private tours of the Scottish Highlands, believed the tonnage bounties had to be permanent, in view of the fickleness of the herring in order to provide proper incentives. 43 Anderson submitted voluminous supplementary evidence in support of his views, some of which were statistical accounts requested by Beaufoy’s committee including the number and name of busses receiving the bounties, the number of barrels cured, and the bounties paid by district. In contrast, Adam Smith had supported his criticism in The Wealth of Nations with only one table comparing the costs and benefits of the tonnage bounties. 44
Included among Anderson’s evidentiary supplements were two essays on the seasonality of herring appearances. The latter was specifically requested by Beaufoy’s committee in order to expose the restraining effect of the rendezvous provision of the 1778 fishery act. This provision required the bounty busses to commence their fishery between 1 August and 1 October, but not sooner, whereas the Dutch fishery began every year on 24 June. Anderson took pains to dispel the myths surrounding herring, which he called the ‘ancient theory’ of the herring migrations. 45 This was polar seas migration theory which James Solas Dodd presented so colourfully to the fishery society, but which Anderson had found to be inconsistent with the empirical evidence from fishers about actual occurrences along the coast. 46 John Knox, on the other hand, explained the herring occurrences in terms of the Great Shoal, another name for the migration theory. 47
Anderson, however, did not doubt that the herring was fickle. On his tour he learned that inshore herring catches had defied prediction just as much in years when war or other reasons prevented the Dutch busses from fishing near the Shetland Islands. Anderson’s proposed solution was for a new British fishery society to construct towns for the people who were now free from the burdens of collecting firewood for the coming winter. More than villages, these settlements would be communities, and would house and support the fishermen and allied occupations who stood ready to catch and cure the herring regardless of where they came in shore. He thought a temporary policy of vessel bounties was reasonable, but was insufficient to allow a fishery in the West Highlands to take hold. Anderson agreed with other witnesses that a canal would help by giving fishing vessels a shorter and safer route from the Atlantic to the Firth of Clyde and to the markets in Glasgow. 48
Henry Beaufoy concluded his parliamentary inquiry only four months after he was appointed its chair. He tabled four committee reports, the third of which included both Anderson’s lengthy report and supplementary materials, and the full text of Adam Smith’s critique, which had only just been published, in November 1784. 49 Witnesses speaking on the buss bounties were asked if they agreed with ‘Dr. Smith’s views’ and if they did not, to defend continuation of the tonnage bounty system.
In his speech to the House of Commons, Beaufoy criticized the conditions which previous parliaments had attached to the tonnage bounties in order to keep the vessels at sea for as long as possible. He said the laws regulating the time and location of the British herring fisheries were cumbersome and counterproductive, serving the narrow interests of a few to the detriment of the many. Beaufoy singled out the fisheries law amendment in 1778 prohibiting fishing before 1 August, sensing that it was designed to allow the merchant-investors of the Glasgow region to monopolize the tonnage bounties. 50 As Smith had done, Beaufoy railed against the requirement that taxed, domestic salt be used for curing herring for the home market; the superior, imported salt the law required for curing herring for export was duty free. This raised the local price of herring, putting it out of reach for many who needed the fish for sustenance. This oppressed the poor, argued Beaufoy, echoing Adam Smith’s most stinging indictment. Tracing the famine of 1783 directly to the salt taxes, he argued that the salt tax must be repealed if there was to be any hope of firmly establishing a herring fishery in the highlands and islands of Scotland.
Henry Beaufoy’s proposed reforms also echoed Smith’s recommendations regarding the herring bounties. If Beaufoy had indeed accepted Smith’s ‘idea’ as Smith later stated in his letter of 14 November 1786, it was the idea of an experiment in policy, testing whether subsidizing a native, small-boat fishery was a better policy for the nation than a fleet of herring busses operated by Dutch fishing masters. Smith, however, was vehemently opposed to the new British Fishery Society’s request for bounties for building fishing towns along the remote coasts, the core of James Anderson’s proposal. Such inducements were doomed to fail, he wrote to Beaufoy on 29 January 1787. His only consolation was that the private investors lured in by government subsidies would lose their own money and not the state’s. 51
The Herring Enlightenment
The question remains whether it was a deep aversion to subsidies or something else that inspired Adam Smith to single out for criticism the tonnage bounties in The Wealth of Nations. Given his view of the superiority of Dutch herring, could he have believed tacitly that the herring was resisting commodification as an article of British commerce? 52 It is likely that Adam Smith knew at least a part of the herring’s historical role in building the Dutch economy, at least as far as the British wars with the Dutch and the French were concerned. Oliver Cromwell’s navy had waged war against the Dutch herring busses and their naval escorts, and David Hume, Smith’s fellow Enlightenment scholar and dearly departed friend, wrote of these conflicts in his magisterial six-volume History of England. Smith himself had written about how different the Dutch economic model was from Britain’s. 53
Smith was in some senses a local boy. He was born and educated, and wrote much of The Wealth of Nations, in Kirkcaldy, a town in the county of Fife, on the open coast of the Firth of Forth, where seasonal herring fisheries were the occupation of many. During the last dozen years of his life, from January 1778 until his death in July 1790, he was a commissioner of customs in Edinburgh, where he lived with his mother, Margaret, until her death in 1784. 54 His views on the herring subsidies may have been informed by first-hand observation at the Customs House, which gave him access to the statistical data he used in the only table in his book. Or they may have been informed by the ‘folk ecology’ of Fife, the local knowledge of a natural resource that one acquires through casual conversation with the fishmonger, a neighbour, and through the food habits and preferences of one’s family and community. Smith’s neighbours and family could have told him many things about the nature of herring. Perhaps local people did not believe in the Great Shoal theory that lay beneath the buss bounties. In their experience, herring were so unpredictable, yet when they did arrive, were readily caught by the small open boats, which came to be known as Fifies.
We will never know for certain why Adam Smith chose to write about herring subsidies in the third edition, but there are good grounds for speculation. The Wealth of Nations was packed with similar case studies that he had written originally as early-morning lectures to undergraduates at Glasgow, his ‘homespun tales about routine objects and everyday interactions’. 55 But Smith wrote few letters and almost none of them mention the herring bounties, with the exception of a letter in January 1780 to William Eden. 56 He did have strong feelings about the policies intending to favour particular industries. In an undated letter to Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, Smith wrote, ‘I could write a volume upon the folly and bad effects of all the legal encouragements that have been given either to the linen manufacture or to the fisheries’. 57 Fortunately, the two letters he wrote to Henry Beaufoy in 1786 survive. 58 It is tempting to surmise that he drew upon his own local knowledge of herring, and upon popular views of why herring were so ‘fickle’. But Smith’s desire to strengthen his indictment of mercantilism with empirical evidence rather than begin the long-planned but unfinishable treatise on jurisprudence, 59 is what best explains why he dwelt on the problem of the herring tonnage bounties. When Smith learned that James Anderson’s report did not endorse making the tonnage bounties permanent and instead included a plan for making the small-boat fishery viable, he saw an opportunity. With Parliament’s help he could demonstrate that there were viable alternatives to mercantilism, policies that appropriately aligned the incentives of producers with the environmental realities of the resources they harvested.
However, if Adam Smith had the idea to experiment with a system of small-boat subsidies, it was James Anderson and Henry Beaufoy who made it possible for this experiment to become law in 1785. When the experiment succeeded so well that all herring subsidies were lifted in 1804, a government board took over the task of regulating seasons and curing methods to ensure quality. 60 The stage was set for the mid-century Scottish Herring Boom. By lifting the herring subsidies and other similar inducements, Britain embraced a liberal economic model – what scholars might now call laissez-faire capitalism – just when the colonial plantations and factory towns of the Industrial Revolution needed herring in immense quantities. But neither should all the credit for the Herring Enlightenment go to Westminster. Nature and change in climate played a role. At the very end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the herring appeared in huge shoals immediately off the Scottish coastline, ending a string of years of very bad catches. Every boat, buss, and pair of hands was put to work catching and curing herring. 61
As Kapstein concludes: Nature, with a little help from parliament, had bolstered the West Highland fisheries, and the general improvement of the Highlands would continue throughout the nineteenth century. … When the runs were bad, nothing could help the fisheries, but policies could help prepare the fleet for good years. … [T]he regular payment of the bounty was a necessary step before any larger improvements could result from, for example, the construction of a canal. When the canal was completed, however, trade expanded, and the fisheries were then able to truly prosper.
62
The small-boat bounties allowed the herring fishermen to enter into ‘engagements’ with the curers, setting a price for the season and spreading the risks of an unpredictable herring migration. This system allowed them to work for wages rather than a share of an uncertain catch and it persisted for the duration of the era of the bounties. 63
Thus it appears that the herring vessel subsidies were essential to the building of the Scottish herring fishery and the vibrant towns and villages that adapted to the Great Shoal’s seasonal rhythms. Did the revision of the tonnage bounties happen because a small group of citizens, experts and policymakers, were inspired by Adam Smith’s vision of a virtuous economy? If so, their shared vision reached fruition in the Scottish Herring Boom, with the help of the enlightened herring.
Conclusions
Adam Smith’s criticism of the tonnage bounties in The Wealth of Nations was crucial to the reform of British fisheries policies and to the nineteenth-century expansion of British herring fisheries, building coastal communities in Scotland that to this day celebrate their fishing heritage, even though the small-boat fishery is gone. 64 The success of the herring trade in Scotland also helped cement the union between Scotland and Britain. 65 Even though he might have been selective in his choice of data, Adam Smith, with the help of his contemporaries, demonstrated that policy based on evidence, rather than on regional politics, was best able to help a domestic maritime industry reach its full potential. It is unfortunate that in the twentieth century, policymakers keen to encourage technological innovation in this same industry lost sight of this lesson. Steam-trawlers heavily exploited the herring populations of the North Sea, so that when environmental conditions again turned unfavourable, the once-inexhaustible empire of herring collapsed. 66
Footnotes
Appendix
1.
James R. Coull, ‘Fishery Development in Scotland in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 21, No. 1 (2001), 11; John Leazer, ‘A Case for Subsidies? Adam Smith and the Eighteenth Century Scottish Herring Fishery’, The Historian, 75, No. 1 (2013), 47–68.
2.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd, eds. (2 vols., Oxford, 1976), I, 518. See Appendix for Smith’s text on herring bounties.
3.
Jean Dunlop, The British Fisheries Society, 1786–1893 (Edinburgh, 1978), 18.
4.
Dunlop, British Fisheries Society, 20–21.
5.
See Arthur M. Samuel, The Herring: Its Effect on the History of Britain (London, 1918).
6.
James R. Coull, ‘The Scottish Herring Fishery 1800–1914: Development and Intensification of a Pattern of Resource Use’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 102, No. 1 (1986), 4–17 at 5–6.
7.
See John Cramsie, ‘Commercial Projects and the Fiscal Policy of James VI and I’, The Historical Journal, 43, No. 2 (2000), 345–64.
8.
Douglas M. Johnston, The International Law of Fisheries: A Framework for Policy-Oriented Inquiries (New Haven CT and London, 1965), 72.
9.
A. Beaujon, ‘The History of the Dutch Sea Fisheries: Progress, Decline and Revival’, Fisheries Exhibition Literature, Vol. IX (Prize Essays, Part II) (London, 1884), 83.
10.
Coull, ‘Scottish Herring Fishery’, 5.
11.
Beaujon, ‘Dutch Sea Fisheries’, 80–1.
12.
James R. Coull, The Sea Fisheries of Scotland: A Historical Geography (Edinburgh, 1996), 54.
13.
See, for example, D. F. Denovan, Prospectus of a Joint-Stock White Herring Fishing Company, to be established at Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1825), 2.
14.
Anna Gambles, ‘Free Trade and State Formation: The Political Economy of Fisheries Policy in Britain and the United Kingdom circa 1780–1850’, Journal of British Studies, 3 (2000), 288–316.
15.
Bob Harris, ‘Patriotic Commerce and National Revival: The Free British Fishery Society and British Politics’, English Historical Review, 114, No. 456 (1999), 302.
16.
James Travis Jenkins, The Herring and the Herring Fisheries (London, 1927), 92.
17.
Michael Haines, ‘The Herring Fisheries, 1750–1900’, in D. J. Starkey, C. Reid and N. Ashcroft eds., England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300 (London, 2000), 65.
18.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, 518–22. See Appendix for Smith’s text on herring bounties.
19.
J. F. Denovan, An Essay on the Migration and Food of the Herring (London, 1825), 9–10; Coull, ‘Fishery Development’, 10.
20.
Haines, ‘Herring Fisheries’, 65. The English herring fishing grounds were forty miles off shore.
21.
Richard W. Unger, ‘The Netherlands Herring Fishery in the Late Middle Ages: The False Legend of Willem Beukels of Biervliet’, Viator, 9, No. 1 (1978), 335–56.
22.
Jenkins, Herring Fisheries, 71–72.
23.
John Leazer, ‘The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Scottish Herring Fishery: The Effect of the 1707 Treaty of Union and Its Impact on Early Modern Great Britain’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Chicago Loyola, 2005), 151.
24.
Coull, Sea Fisheries of Scotland, 71.
25.
Dunlop, British Fisheries Society, 24.
26.
Leazer, ‘Scottish Herring Fishery’, 201–2. British fisheries historian James Travis Jenkins believed Smith deliberately manipulated the statistics ‘to serve his argument … to throw discredit on the bounty system’. Jenkins criticized Smith’s use of 1759, a year when the number of busses and the fishery’s catches were at their lowest. Jenkins, The Herring and the Herring Fisheries (London, 1927), 103 and 108.
27.
Ethan B. Kapstein, ‘The Improvement of the West Highlands Fisheries 1785–1800’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 66 (1980), 145, 147–8 and 157.
28.
Haines, ‘Herring Fisheries’, 65.
29.
Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (Edinburgh, 2014), 3.
30.
David R. Raynor, ‘Adam Smith: Two Letters to Henry Beaufoy, MP’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 43, No. 5 (1996), 579–89, at 583 (original emphasis) and 586.
31.
In a letter to William Eden, protesting the ban on imported herring, Smith suggests he favoured the taste of Dutch cured herring to the local style. Adam Smith letter to William Eden 3 January 1780 [203] in E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross, eds., The Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford, 1977), 245.
32.
Adam Smith letter to William Strahan (publisher of Theory of Moral Sentiments), 22 May 1783 [227], in Mossner and Ross, eds., Correspondence, 266. Adam Smith’s admirers and patrons secured his appointment in 1778 as a commissioner of customs in Edinburgh, presumably to give him an income that would allow him to complete the third book in his planned trilogy on a ‘science of man’. Philippson, Adam Smith, 209. To their chagrin, Smith took his duties quite seriously, which put off his own writing. With illness, Smith decided to focus on a new and expanded edition of Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments, but even this work was delayed. Not until 1782 did he take a four-month leave of absence and travel to London. He traveled again in 1783; this is probably when he decided to advocate directly reforming the herring bounties. Raynor, ‘Two Letters’, 580.
33.
Raynor, ‘Two Letters’, 580.
34.
Adam Smith letter to Thomas Caddell (publisher of Wealth of Nations), 7 Dec 1782 [222] in Mossner and Ross, eds., Correspondence, 263. Smith promises to send the manuscript for the third edition in two or three months. Caddell replies that ‘if we cannot get [it] in time to publish before the Town is empty we will postpone it to the meeting of Parliament in the ensuing winter’. Thomas Caddell to Adam Smith, 12 December 1782 [223], in Mossner and Ross, eds., Correspondence, 264.
35.
Adam Smith to Henry Dundas, 18 July 1787 [272], in Mossner and Ross, eds., Correspondence, 306.
36.
Dunlop, British Fisheries Society, 20.
37.
Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons, Reports of the House of Commons, Vol. X, Committee appointed to enquire into the State of British Fisheries; and into the most effectual Means for their Encouragement and Extension, First Report reported by Henry Beaufoy, 4 May 1786 (London, 1803), 9–198.
38.
See, e.g., Committee to enquire, First Report (examination of Mr. John Knox), 77–78.
39.
Kapstein, ‘West Highland Fisheries’, 147, citing John Knox, A View of the British Empire, more especially Scotland, with some proposals for the improvement of that country, the extension of its fisheries, and the relief of its people (2 vols., 4th edition, London, 1784).
40.
John Mitchell, The Herring: Its Natural History and National Importance (Edinburgh, 1864), 207; James Solas Dodd, An Essay Towards a Natural History of the Herring (London, 1752), 44–49. Dodd also included a number of recipes, promoting the nutritional and medicinal properties that made herring ‘good food in the plagues’ – Dodd, Natural History, 100.
41.
Salim Rashid, ‘James Anderson, Fisheries and Regional Economic Development in Scotland’, History of Economic Ideas, 17, No. 1 (2000), 17. According to Rashid, Anderson was an accomplished economic development theorist; Karl Marx reputedly believed Malthus had plagiarized Anderson’s theory of economic rent. Anderson disagreed with Adam Smith’s arguments in Wealth of Nations on the corn bounty and on his characterization of ‘rent’ in his 1777 book, Observations on the spirit of National Industry. Rashid, ‘Anderson’, 9 and 10. Anderson mentioned this disagreement in his report to the Beaufoy committee. Rashid suggests Anderson’s 1783 pamphlet on colonial policies brought him to Pitt’s attention and made him desirable as a consultant. Pitt wrote Anderson a letter of appointment on 23 June 1783. Pitt may have regretted the appointment, however, when he read Anderson’s report urging repeal of the coal duties, the reduction of tonnage bounties, and the encouragement of private financing of roads, canals and commercial towns. Pitt may have offered the task to Adam Smith, who would probably have turned him down, preferring to judge the tonnage bounties from customs data rather than from interviewing fishers, curers, and vessel owners. The Committee’s hearings were held between April and July 1785. Raynor, ‘Two Letters’, 580–81.
42.
James Anderson, ‘A Report of Facts relating to the Fisheries, collected in a Tour among the Islands, and along the Western Coasts of Scotland’, printed as Appendix 11 to the Third Report from the Committee appointed to enquire into the State of British Fisheries; and into the most effectual Means for their Encouragement and Extension, reported by Henry Beaufoy, 4 May 1786, in Reports from Committees of the House of Commons (London, 1803), vol. X, 66–80.
43.
Knox submitted testimony based on popular book, A view of the British Empire, more especially Scotland, with some proposals for the Improvement of that country, the extension of its fisheries, and the relief of the people (London, 1784), quoted from extensively in Kapstein, ‘Improvements’, 149–50.
44.
Anderson was a strong proponent of empirical data. Rashid, ‘Anderson’, 10. It was, however, Adam Smith’s table that appeared in Beaufoy’s committee’s third report as Appendix 20 to Third Report, Reports, 113.
45.
Anderson, ‘Report of Facts’, in Third Report, Reports, 66–80. The Reports also contain the voluminous evidence Anderson submitted to the Committee in support of his ‘Report of Facts’, including essays on the ancient theory of herring migrations and why it was wrong. Anderson, ‘Report of Facts’, Appendix 11 to Third Report, Reports, 91–93.
46.
James Anderson, ‘A Report of Facts relating to the Fisheries, collected in a Tour among the Islands, and along the Western Coasts of Scotland …’ (July 1785), printed as Appendix 11 in the Third Report from the Committee appointed to enquire into the State of British Fisheries; and into the most effectual Means for their Encouragement and Extension, reported by Henry Beaufoy, 4 May 1786, in Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, Vol. X (London, 1803), 90 and 91–2.
47.
Beaufoy, Third Report, Reports, 40 (discussing examination of Mr. John Knox).
48.
Rashid, ‘Anderson’, 9–31, 17.
49.
Beaufoy, Third Report, Reports, 1803. Smith had instructed Thomas Caddell to publish the revisions to Wealth of Nations as a stand-alone pamphlet. Adam Smith letter to Thomas Caddell 7 December 1782 [222] in Mossner and Ross, eds., Correspondence, 263.
50.
Raynor, ‘Two Letters’, 581–2.
51.
Raynor, ‘Two Letters’.
52.
Mossner and Ross, eds., Correspondence, 245; On commodification of herring, see Tony J. Pitcher and Mimi E. Lam, ‘Fish Commoditization and the Historical Origins of Catching Fish for Profit’, Maritime Studies, 14 (2015), 2–19.
53.
Jonathan Conlin, Adam Smith (London, 2016), 35, 186–187.
54.
Phillipson, Adam Smith, 258–61; Jonathan Conlin, Adam Smith, 37.
55.
Conlin, Adam Smith, 9.
56.
In a letter to William Eden from Edinburgh, dated 3 January 1780 [203], Smith did write about the futility of prohibiting the import of goods to encourage domestic production. In this discussion, he reveals his opinion on why the British were producing so few herring for export. ‘Instead of encouraging, [the import prohibition] commonly prevents the improvement and extension of the branch of industry it is meant to promote. Dutch cured Herrings cannot be imported upon forfeiture of Ship and cargo. They are, however, vastly superior to British cured you can scarcely imagine the difference. The price of a barrel of British cured Herrings is about a guinea and that of the Dutch, I imagine is nearly the same. Instead of the prohibition, lay a tax of half a guinea a barrel upon the Dutch Herrings. Dutch Herrings will, in this case, sell in Great Britain at S. 33 or Sh 34 Shillings, a circumstance which will confine them altogether to the tables of the better sort of people. The British curers will immediately endeavour to get this high price, and by superior care and cleanliness to raise their goods to an equality with the Dutch, and this emulation will, probably, in five or six years time raise the manufacture to a degree of improvement, which at present I despair of its attaining to in fifty or Sixty years’. Mossner and Ross, eds., Correspondence, 245.
57.
Mossner and Ross, eds., Correspondence, 327. The editors believe the letter was written 30 January 1786.
58.
See Raynor, ‘Two Letters’.
59.
Conlin, Adam Smith, 152.
60.
Jenkins, Herring Fisheries, 110–113.
61.
Kapstein, ‘West Highland Fisheries’, 155, citing Samuel, The Herring, 160–1.
62.
Kapstein, ‘West Highland Fisheries’, 155.
63.
Coull, Sea Fisheries of Scotland, 63.
64.
Jane Nadel-Klein, Fishing for Heritage: Modernity and Loss Along the Scottish Coast (Bloomsbury, 2003), 185.
65.
See generally Leazer, ‘Scottish Herring Fishery.’
66.
D. H. Cushing, The Provident Sea (Cambridge, 1988), 252.