The Fisherman's Cause: Atlantic Commerce and Maritime Dimensions of the American Revolution (review)

Magra invites historians of the imperial crisis and the American Revolution to pay closer attention to the colonists' maritime interests, including their trade in fish. He links New England's role as the catalyst of revolution with the region's leadership in the colonial offshore fishery. During the early eighteenth century, New England mariners expanded their fisheries beyond coastal waters to tap the more abundant but more distant waters of the Sable Island Bank and the Grand Bank, south and southeast of Newfoundland. They primarily caught cod, a large protein-rich fish, to feed the poor in southwestern Europe or to sustain the slaves of the sugar plantations in the West Indies.

The trade in fish enabled the New Englanders to procure rum, sugar, and molasses from the West Indies and, by trans-shipping those products, to procure manufactured goods from Great Britain. But this boon to New England appalled the mercantalists of the British Empire; the colonists competed with the English fishermen based in the West Country. Used to dominating the Grand Banks, the West Country merchants bristled at losing market share to the New Englanders, who also wooed away laborers sent from England to Newfoundland for the fishing season. The New Englanders also alienated the powerful sugar planters and merchants of the British West Indies, who resented the growing trade in fish with their rivals in the French West Indies. The Royal Navy officers also despised that illicit trade, because it helped the French colonies during their frequent wars with the British.

Responsive to the West Country merchants and West Indian planters, the British government enforced trade regulations on the New Englanders more strictly during the 1760s. That crackdown increased New England's alienation from the Empire. As punishment for resisting taxes and harassing customs officers, Parliament passed a "Restraining Act," which barred New Englanders from the offshore fisheries. But the news of this law reached New England ten days after the Revolution had erupted into fighting at Lexington and Concord.

Thorough and careful in his research, Magra makes a persuasive case for the importance of the fisheries to colonial New England's economy and attitudes toward the Empire. But he overstates his subsequent argument for the pivotal importance of the fishermen to winning the War of the American Revolution. By playing up their role with regard to the navy and privateers, he sells short the massive power of the Royal Navy, which dominated the Atlantic until the French entered the war as American allies. He also misses an opportunity to clinch his case by closing the book with only a perfunctory discussion of the role of the fisheries in the peace negotiations. He leaves unexplored the consequences of the war for the place of the New England fisheries in the political economy of the new nation. Did the revolution reward the fishermen who did so much to create the breach with the empire?