Science and the Political Economy of an Industrialized Fishery: An Ecosystem-Based Study of the 1870s Southern New England Inshore Fishery

When over three thousand inshore fishermen petitioned the Massachusetts General Court in 1869 for a ban on shore traps and weirs, controversies about the health of fish and fishermen along the southern New England shore erupted in unprecedented ways.  For the first time, fishermen, scientists, and policy makers squared-off over whether humans could affect the abundance of marine fish. Hook-and-line fishermen presented political, moral, and ecological arguments against weir and trap fishing. In response, trap fishermen countered with scientific, economic and ideological arguments that ridiculed the prospect of anthropogenic fisheries change and defended the “progress” of New England’s fisheries. While everyone agreed that stocks were declining, the debate raged over whether human fishing was to blame, and what was the relationship between a modernizing industry and the natural resources on which it relied.            While historians have long known of Spencer Baird’s 1871 New England fisheries investigations, few have looked beyond the role that these efforts played in inaugurating government funded scientific research. Most studies have failed to consider the controversy in its political and ecological context. And yet, as works by McFarland, Rosenberg and Bolster, Hillborn, and Grasso have shown, humans and fish co-exist ecologically, economically, and politically.            Fisheries histories, manuscript sources, cultural accounts, and landings data, when examined through these lenses compel us to reconsider the hook-and-line fishermen’s protests from the 1870s.  Southern New England’s inshore fishermen were far from passive victims of an industrializing economy. Their protests from the 1870s represented one of the first political manifestations of ecological change in the coastal ocean, and force us to reconsider the impact of fishing on fish stocks and fishing communities during the earliest phases of industrialized fisheries.