Fishing

The first two chapters cover the history of fishing in the early modern era. This chapter begins with a series of framing arguments about the place of fishing in the early modern world, to showcase debates and new directions in the study of fishing at the center of recent scholarship. These themes, problems, and methodological issues are important not just to fishing, but to early modern marine environmental history as a whole. This chapter lays out distinctions between different kinds of fishing, subsistence and commercial, and the difficulties of categorization. Then it explores the important problem of scale, and how fishing activity increased over the early modern era. Finally, it discusses several problems: how fishing shaped human space and settlement, the role of knowledge in fishing, and the long-term consequences of fishing.