A Fishery for Modern Times: The State and the Industrialization of the Newfoundland Fishery, 1934-1968 (review)

The Newfoundland fishing grounds provided Europeans and Americans with plentiful food for centuries. Their collapse in the early 1990s haunts every discussion of fisheries management and regulation today, including debates about fisheries regulation in the European Union. Against this background, Miriam Wright's book is about much more than the fortunes of a few fishermen and politicians whose misguided activities culminated in ecological catastrophe.

In the period Wright addresses, politicians in Newfoundland adopted what can be termed differing manifestations of a developmental and state-oriented industrialization ideology. The exact shape of this ideology depended, inter alia, on Newfoundland's changing position within the British Commonwealth and the Canadian Confederation. It also reflected the technological and financial opportunities available at any given time. Still, the idea that the government should in some way initiate, finance, and even carry out industrializing projects was always hegemonic.

Applied to fisheries, this meant promotion of large vessels and large processing units (particularly freezing plants), mass exports to the U.S. market, and intensive competition, both for fish and for customers. Alternative strategies existed in the form of proposals for fishermen's cooperatives and in general critiques of the industrial vision of modernity, but these enjoyed little support among the leading actors. Eventually, the industrialized fisheries, requiring ever larger catches to repay escalating investments in machinery and vessels, became too effective and emptied the fishing grounds.

This summary may leave the impression that policymaking in Newfoundland (and Canada) amounted to a straightforward application of industrial-development ideology to fisheries. But this is not how Wright describes it. She starts her narrative in the 1930s, a period in which Newfoundland was treated more or less as a colony needing benevolent developmental assistance from Britain. It was also the time when effective freezing technologies started to spread. She then leads us patiently through the years of the Second World War and the immediate postwar period, up to the establishment of industrial fisheries in the 1960s. During and after the war, freezing came to overshadow salting, smoking, and drying. Freezing had the additional advantage of being a "modern" technology that fit perfectly into a small but significant role in the domestic refrigeration revolution.

Newfoundland became a part of Canada in 1949. For the Ministry of Fisheries, it was essential to put an end to any underdevelopment in this newly added outpost. The ministry found a ready ally in Joseph Smallwood, who served as provincial premier for more than two decades after 1949. Indeed, the latter part of Wright's book sometimes resembles a "life and times" narrative of Smallwood's exploits. Through a series of projects that often seemed like complete flops, Smallwood and his changing cast of associates attempted again and again to get the Newfoundland economy off the ground by supporting private ventures with government funds. In the end they were successful, but the price was higher than expected.

An important aspect of the story is Canada's position in the international negotiations over fishing limits, particularly during the 1960s. At the outset, the United States and the British government were opposed to the expansion of territorial waters as a tool of fisheries policy, though for different reasons. The British sought to protect the interests of their deep-sea fishing fleet. In the United States, conservation and sustainable harvesting of marine resources were connected with cold war concerns. Between these powerful allies (and important markets), the Canadian government had little room for maneuver. While tiny Iceland extended its fishing limits unilaterally several times, and got away with it, Canada could not ignore the opposition of the United States. In consequence, fishermen from all over Europe and the United States continued to harvest the Newfoundland fishing grounds. The competitive pressures that often drive large-scale technical...