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  • All the Boats on the Ocean: How Government Subsidies Led to Global Overfishing by Carmel Finley
  • Evan P. Bennett
All the Boats on the Ocean: How Government Subsidies Led to Global Overfishing
Carmel Finley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017
viii + 211 pp., $45.00 (cloth)

The list of things that have changed the world grows every year. Publishers, eschewing modesty, make big promises on their covers, guaranteeing explanations of how one thing caused some massive change or another in history. The greatest weakness of these books, of course, is that monocausal explanations are doomed to fail if taken too seriously. The best authors build on their promissory hook to explore larger historical forces driving change. The subtitle of Carmel Finley's All the Boats on the Ocean similarly promises to pin a large historical change on one cause, but the promise feels as if it is the publicity department's, not the author's, because the book attempts to do much more than explain how government subsidies depleted the world's oceans. In fact, the author is interested in several stories in addition to the one promised in the subtitle. She is only partly successful in telling any of them.

Finley's work is built on two related stories: the expansion of fishing fleets as a tool of Cold War diplomacy and the overfishing of the Pacific. The latter, she acknowledges, is well known, but its connection to the former, less so. To connect fishing and geopolitics, she chooses to focus on the Oregon coast and its rosefish fishery, which became a target of Soviet factory ships in the mid-twentieth century. However, this is no local history. Finley, instead, ranges over space and time to explore how industrialized fishing, modern maritime law, and trade policies constructed to cultivate and buttress Cold War allies created "a new stage of imperialism" in an era when land-based empires were falling apart (2). In eight chapters, she examines and compares the abortive development of the American fishing industry in the Pacific after World War II to that of Japan's and the Soviet Union's; US diplomatic efforts to support Iceland's fishing industry in order to maintain air bases on the island nation; the role of tariffs in shaping US domestic fish consumption; the growth of industrialized fishing fleets; and the development of government claims on ocean spaces. Labor historians will find in her relative brief coverage of the effects of tariffs on US fishermen, especially in the Northeast, an important angle for considering how globalization devastated American maritime industries as early as the 1950s.

Finley is on to a number of important stories in this book, but in trying to do too much, she fails to provide a convincing account of any one of them. Editing, not research, is the key problem with this work. Finley knows modern fisheries history as well as anyone, and it is clear this is a labor of love for her. But her argument is lost in meandering prose that refuses to remain on task. While the chapters purport to examine specific topics, they lack clear arguments and it is unclear how they fit together. Within each, the frame of reference often jumps from the local to the global and back to the local without [End Page 137] much warning or explanation. Arguments are repeated in multiple places without much to link them together. Evidence is thrown around rather than marshaled. Overall, the lack of focus makes this book tough to read and difficult to recommend. [End Page 138]

Evan P. Bennett
Florida Atlantic University
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