Small Boats and Large Ships: Social Continuity and Technical Change in the Icelandic Fisheries, 1800-1960

In the year 1800, Iceland was a remote colony of the Kingdom of Denmark, still recovering from a catastrophic volcanic eruption in 1794 and the famine that ensued. Two hundred years later the independent republic of Iceland consistently ranks among the top ten nations worldwide in terms of gross domestic product per capita and similar indicators. Icelandic industrialization seems to have succeeded admirably. Fish exports have been the backbone of the country's foreign trade since the seventeenth century, and the fisheries are arguably the foundation of this success.

Mainstream views of industrialization cast small-scale industries in an auxiliary role at best, and even see them as relics of earlier modes of production, set to disappear. However, a small but growing number of writers have begun to ask whether the evolution of small-scale production can actually be seen as a key feature of industrialization, long-term technological change, and economic development. ¹ In this article I explore this idea by analyzing the case of fisheries in Iceland. I argue that the evolutionary technological dynamism of small-scale fisheries, which competed successfully with large-scale alternatives, constituted the core of the industrial dynamism that powered Iceland's transition from poverty to prosperity. The dynamism of small-scale fisheries relied on social continuities in rural and village communities around the country. The story of their competition with large-scale operations can tell us much about the economic and social development of the nation as a whole and suggests a corrective interpretation for general theories of industrialization.

The mechanization of Iceland's fisheries is presented here as a drama in three acts. Act one outlines the economic and social development of Iceland up to 1900. It introduces one of our main protagonists, the small-boat fisheries, whose origins lie among preindustrial peasant farmers. Smacks—decked sailing vessels suited to coasting and fishing—owned by merchants and wealthy landowners embodied the large-scale competition during this period.

As the second act opens, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the small-boat fisheries are mechanized. Simultaneously, strong interests, in part the outgrowths of an earlier mercantile capitalism, are building small empires based on an expanding trawler fleet. But as the second act unfolds we learn that the trawlers did not displace the small-boat fisheries. In this central part of the article we see how resilient social structures, dating from the preindustrial era, shaped the mechanization process. After the initial mechanization of fisheries was completed, about 1925, small boats and trawlers and the sociotechnical complexes associated with them continued to coexist, until the motorboat fleet pulled ahead during the Great Depression of the thirties.

After a pause in the narrative during World War II, act three opens with the rehabilitation of the trawler fleet, led by Iceland's postwar Reconstruction Government. As this final act closes, around 1960, the trawlers have been excluded from the traditional fishing grounds by a unilateral extension of the limits that describe the waters in which fishing is regulated by the Icelandic government. Meanwhile, the evolution of motorboats and small-scale fisheries has continued, and in the early sixties they still catch more fish than the trawlers.

Once the curtain falls it becomes the critic's turn, and the remainder of the article is devoted to an analysis of these historical experiences. The small-boat fleet changed in many ways between 1800 and 1960, but without either sharp technological breaks or major social ruptures. Up to about 1960 small-scale fishing continued to be embedded in local communities around the country. At the same time, a succession of actors—merchants, financiers, and the government—introduced a succession of larger vessels: smacks in the nineteenth century, trawlers in the early twentieth century, a new generation of trawlers after World War II. They never came close to replacing the small-scale...