-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Wendy Wong, Thomas Blake Earle. The Liberty to Take Fish: Atlantic Fisheries and Federal Power in Nineteenth-Century America., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 500–501, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae610
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Can the environment play an influential role in statecraft and diplomacy? In a new book examining fisheries as an effective lens for exploring nineteenth-century Anglo-US relations, Thomas Blake Earle answers in the affirmative. The Liberty to Take Fish derives its title from the Treaty of Paris (1783) that forever allowed the United States access to the fisheries on the Grand Banks and along the coasts of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Labrador (5). Earle argues that fisheries, fishermen, and fish were central to the diplomatic tension and turbulence between Britain and the United States from the years following independence until after the Civil War. In the nineteenth-century, the United States was a maritime power comparable to other maritime powers such as the British Empire and the Dutch Republic, and fish were a valuable resource requiring extraction. Long an integral part of US statecraft, Americans saw fishermen and fish as guarantors of US political and commercial independence until a desire for peace with Britain during Reconstruction made the fisheries a lesser priority for the federal government. “The history of fisheries,” Earle contends, “is the history of statecraft” (4).
