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The History and Historiography of Fisheries in the Age of the “Oceanic Turn”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2025

Romain Grancher
Romain Grancher*
Affiliation:
CNRS, FRAMESPA (UMR 5136)
*
romain.grancher@cnrs.fr
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Extract

Fishing, the last practice of exploiting nature based on the large-scale predation and commercialization of wild animal resources, has not always received the attention it deserves from the social sciences in terms of its ecological, anthropological, and historical significance.1 Studies devoted to the subject, long confined to narrowly specialized and spatially compartmentalized subfields of research such as maritime history and anthropology, have remained comparatively niche.2 The fact that a generalist journal such as the Annales has devoted an entire special issue to the history of fishing worlds is therefore significant. It is a sign of the increased recognition and visibility of the many studies currently being carried out on the subject, and also an indication of a new interest in the ocean, or at least of a different way of looking at it.3 Until recently, most historical accounts were written about or from dry land.4 This “default” land-based perspective began to be criticized and then countered in the 2000s, particularly in the context of reflections on the Anthropocene. Over the last two decades, the liquid part of the globe has become an object and a field of investigation in its own right, to the point that this decentering (or refocusing, depending on one’s perspective) has been described by its proponents as a genuine “oceanic turn.”5 The novelty, amplitude, and radical nature of this shift still need to be qualified. Nevertheless, as the anthropologist Hélène Artaud has shown in a recent book,6 studies “of the sea” are currently demonstrating a hitherto unprecedented level of reflexivity, contributing to a different perception of the ocean: no longer an empty, virgin, and threatening space, but an inhabited, transformed, and threatened environment.

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Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , First View , pp. 1 - 14
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© Éditions de l’EHESS 2025

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Footnotes

This introduction was first published as “Histoire et historiographie des mondes de la pêche à l’heure du ‘tournant océanique,’” in “Sociétés maritimes et mondes de la pêche,” special issue, Annales HSS 78, no. 2 (2023): 215–29, doi 10.1017/ahss.2023.70. It was translated from the French by Juliet Powys and edited by Chloe Morgan.

*

I would like to thank Solène Rivoal, Hugo Vermeren, and the members of the Annales editorial board for their comments of an earlier version of this text.

References

1. Brian Fagan, Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Poul Holm et al., “New Challenges for the Human Oceans Past Agenda,” Open Research Europe 114, no. 2 (2022): https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.15095.1.

2. Daniel Vickers, “Beyond Jack Tar,” in “Early American History: Its Past and Future,” special issue, William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 2 (1993): 418–24; Alain Cabantous, “L’histoire maritime : objet de recherche ou leurre historiographique ?” in Pour une histoire du “fait maritime.” Sources et champs de recherches, ed. Christiane Villain-Gandossi and Éric Rieth (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 2001), 33–43; Hélène Artaud, “Anthropologie maritime ou anthropologie de la mer ?” in “Anthropologie marine,” ed. Hélène Artaud et al., thematic dossier, Revue d’ethnoécologie 13 (2018): https://doi.org/10.4000/ethnoecologie.3484.

3. As illustrated by the recent publication of a dossier in the pages of this journal devoted to “La mer, la politique et le droit”: Annales HSS 77, no. 2 (2022): 293–355.

4. Marcus Rediker, “Toward a People’s History of the Sea,” in Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, ed. David Killingray, Margaret Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Woodbridge: Boydell/National Maritime Museum, 2004), 195–206; Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Oceans (New York: Routledge, 2004); Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen, eds., Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007).

5. Research emblematic of these new “blue humanities” includes Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene,” Comparative Literature 69, no. 1 (2017): 32–44; Steve Mentz, “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature,” Literature Compass 6, no. 5 (2009): 997–1013; Philip E. Steinberg and Kimberley Peters, “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume Through Oceanic Thinking,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 2 (2015): 247–64; David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, eds., Oceanic Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson, eds., Blue Legalities: The Life and Laws of the Sea (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), reviewed by Pascale Ricard, Annales HSS 78, no. 2 (2023): 429–32.

6. Hélène Artaud, Immersion. Rencontre des mondes atlantique et pacifique (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2023).

7. From a long tradition of economic and social histories of fishing, see in particular Harold A. Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (New Haven/Toronto: Yale University Press/Ryerson Press, 1940); Éric Dardel, La pêche harenguière en France. Étude d’histoire économique et sociale (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1941); John Rule, “The Smacksmen of the North Sea: Labour Recruitment and Exploitation in British Deep-Sea Fishing, 1850–90,” International Review of Social History 21, no. 3 (1976): 383–411; Trevor Lummis, Occupation and Society: The East Anglian Fishermen, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Margaret S. Creighton, Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Peter E. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

8. For example, Michel Mollat, ed., Histoire des pêches maritimes en France (Toulouse: Privat, 1987); Poul Holm, David J. Starkey, and Jón T. Thór, eds., The North Atlantic Fisheries, 1100–1976: National Perspectives on a Common Resource (Esbjerg: Fiskeri og Søfartsmuseet, 1996); David Starkey, Chris Reid, and Neil Ashcroft, eds., England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales Since 1300 (London: Chatham, 2000); Maria-Lucia De Nicolò, Microcosmi mediterranei. Le comunità dei pescatori nell’età moderna (Bologna: CLUEB, 2004).

9. In France, for instance, the links between history and anthropology were established on the initiative of anthropologists such as Aliette Geistdoerfer, who has worked extensively with historians, including as part of the Groupement d’intérêt scientifique (GIS) “Histoire & Sciences de la mer.” See in particular Christophe Cérino et al., eds., Entre terre et mer. Sociétés littorales et pluriactivités, xve–xxe siècle (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2004). More generally, we should mention the role played by anthropologists whose work has focused on the past, such as Bonnie J. McCay, Oyster Wars and the Public Trust: Property, Law and Ecology in New Jersey History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); or Rob van Ginkel, Braving Troubled Waters: Sea Change in a Dutch Fishing Community (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), reviewed by Emilie Mariat-Roy, Annales HSS 78, no. 2 (2023): 417–20.

10. Raymond Firth, Malay Fishermen: Their Peasant Economy (1946; New York: Norton Library, 1975); Gordon W. Hewes, “The Rubric ‘Fishing and Fisheries,’” American Anthropologist 50, no. 2 (1948): 238–46; William L. Leap, “Maritime Subsistence in Anthropological Perspective: A Statement of Priorities,” in Those Who Live from the Sea: A Study in Maritime Anthropology, ed. M. Estellie Smith (St. Paul: West Pub., 1977), 251–63; James M. Acheson, “Anthropology of Fishing,” Annual Review of Anthropology 10 (1981): 275–316; Yvan Breton, “L’anthropologie sociale et les sociétés de pêcheurs. Réflexions sur la naissance d’un sous-champ disciplinaire,” Anthropologie et Sociétés 5, no. 1 (1981): 7–27; Tim Ingold, The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 80–81. For an overview and reinterpretation of these debates, see Gísli Pálsson, “The Art of Fishing,” Maritime Anthropological Studies 2, no. 1 (1989): 1–20; Artaud, Immersion, 19–30.

11. Pálsson, “The Art of Fishing,” 10–11; Artaud, Immersion, 26–33.

12. Acheson, “Anthropology of Fishing,” 277–88; Breton, “L’anthropologie sociale et les sociétés de pêcheurs,” 15–20. See also Orvar Löfgren, “Resource Management and Family Firms: Swedish West Coast Fishermen,” in North Atlantic Fishermen: Anthropological Essays on Modern Fishing, ed. Raoul Andersen and Cato Wadel (St. John’s: ISER, 1972), 82–103; Bonnie J. McCay, “Systems Ecology, People Ecology, and the Anthropology of Fishing Communities,” Human Ecology 6, 1978): 397–422; James L. Norr and Kathleen L. Norr, “Work Organization in Modern Fishing,” Human Organization 37, no. 2 (1978): 163–71.

13. For a critical perspective on the “share system,” see Jacques Bidet, “Sur les raisons d’être de l’idéologie. Les rapports sociaux dans le secteur de la pêche,” La Pensée 174 (1974): 53–67; van Ginkel, Braving Troubled Waters, 170–83; Penny McCall Howard, “Sharing or Appropriation? Share Systems, Class and Commodity Relations in Scottish Fisheries,” Journal of Agrarian Change 12, no. 2/3 (2012): 316–43.

14. On this subject, see Paul Thompson, “Women in the Fishing: The Roots of Power Between the Sexes,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 27, no. 1 (1985): 3–32; Jane Nadel-Klein and Dona Lee Davis, eds., To Work and to Weep: Women in Fishing Economies (St. John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1988); and, more recently, Kathleen Schwerdtner Máñez and Annet Pauwelussen, “Fish Is Women’s Business Too: Looking at Marine Resource Use Through a Gender Lens,” in Perspectives on Oceans Past: A Handbook of Marine Environmental History, ed. Kathleen Schwerdtner Máñez and Bo Poulsen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 193–211, reviewed by Thierry Sauzeau, Annales HSS 78, no. 2 (2023): 377–379.

15. Fredrik Barth, “Models of Social Organization I” [1966], in Selected Essays of Fredrik Barth, vol. 1, Process and Form in Social Life (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 32–47; Orvar Löfgren, “The Reluctant Competitors: Fisherman’s Luck in Two Swedish Maritime Settings,” Maritime Anthropological Studies 2, no. 1 (1989): 34–58; van Ginkel, Braving Troubled Waters, 82–92; or, in another field, Robert C. Ellickson, “A Hypothesis of Wealth-Maximizing Norms: Evidence from the Whaling Industry,” Journal of Law, Economics & Organization 5, no. 1 (1989): 83–97. All the literature referred to in this first part of the introduction is admittedly dated and debatable, but undeniably rich; as such, it deserves to be more widely read and used by historians. Proposals along these lines can be found in Bo Poulsen, “Talking Fish: Co-operation and Communication in the Dutch North Sea Herring Fisheries, c. 1600–1850,” in Beyond the Catch: Fisheries of the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900–1850, ed. Louis Sicking and Darlene Abreu-Ferreira (Leiden: Brill, 2009); and Romain Grancher, “La mauvaise réputation. Mobilité, succès et renommée des maîtres dans le monde de la pêche (Dieppe, xviiie siècle),” in Travail et mobilité en Europe, xvie–xixe siècles, ed. Andrea Caracausi, Nicoletta Rolla, and Marco Schnyder (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2018), 73–98.

16. See Renaud Morieux, “Lost Letters: Epistolary Communities, War, and Familial Ties in the Maritime Atlantic World of the Eighteenth Century,” Annales HSS (English Edition): 10.1017/ahsse.2024.15; Alain Cabantous, Dix mille marins face à l’Océan. Les populations maritimes de Dunkerque au Havre aux xviie et xviiie siècles, vers 1660–1794 (Paris: Publisud, 1991); Morieux, Les citoyens du large. Les identités maritimes en France, xviie–xixe siècle (Paris: Aubier, 1995).

17. Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019).

18. This expression is borrowed from Artaud (Immersion, 13–14), who postulates the existence of “two oceanic perspectives located respectively in the Atlantic and the Pacific.”

19. On the historiographical changes brought about by the emergence of the environmental question, see in particular Alice Ingold, “Écrire la nature. De l’histoire sociale à la question environnementale ?” in “Environnement,” ed. Alice Ingold, special issue, Annales HSS 66, no. 1 (2011): 11–29.

20. Rediker, “Toward a People’s History of the Sea,” 198; Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, “Introduction: The Sea Is History,” in Klein and Mackenthun, Sea Changes, 1–12; W. Jeffrey Bolster, “Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and Marine Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500–1800,” American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (2008): 19–47.

21. Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Luis Urteaga, La tierra esquilmada. Las ideas sobre la conservación de la naturaleza en la cultura española del siglo xviii (Barcelona/Madrid: Serbal/CSIC, 1987). The clear and persistent neglect of the sea by environmental historians has been underscored on many occasions, notably by W. Jeffrey Bolster, “Opportunities in Marine Environmental History,” Environmental History 11, no. 3 (2006): 567–97; and John R. Gillis, “Filling the Blue Hole in Environmental History,” in “The Future of Environmental History: Needs and Opportunities,” special issue, RCC Perspectives 3 (2011): 16–18.

22. Also mentioned by Nadin Heé in her contribution to this special issue (“Globalizing Japanese Tuna Fisheries: Oceanic Sovereignty in the Twentieth-Century Transimperial Indo-Pacific,” 10.1017/ahsse.2023.1), the recent recognition in the social sciences of the fluidity and verticality of maritime spaces can foremost be credited to geographers, notably Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters, “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces.” For an introduction to what is now known as marine environmental history, despite its almost exclusive focus on fisheries, see Poul Holm, Tim D. Smith, and David J. Starkey, eds., The Exploited Seas: New Directions for Marine Environmental History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001); Bolster, “Opportunities in Marine Environmental History”; Michael Chiarappa and Matthew McKenzie, “New Directions in Marine Environmental History: An Introduction,” Environmental History 18, no. 1 (2013): 3–11; John Gillis and Franziska Torma, eds., Fluid Frontiers: New Currents in Marine Environmental History (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2015); Schwerdtner Máñez and Poulsen, Perspectives on Oceans Past. Daniel Faget provides an overview that is less focused on English-language literature in “L’histoire environnementale, nouveau chantier de l’histoire des pêches en Europe méridionale ? Bilan historiographique et perspectives,” in Écrire l’histoire environnementale au xxie siècle. Sources, méthodes, pratiques, ed. Stéphane Frioux and Renaud Bécot (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2022), 77–92.

23. For an overview of these approaches and objects, see Simonetta Cavaciocchi, ed., Ricchezza del mare, ricchezza dal mare, secc. xiii–xviii, 2 vols. (Florence: Le Monnier, 2006); Sicking and Abreu-Ferreira, Beyond the Catch; Valdo D’Arienzo and Biagio Di Salvia, eds., Pesci, barche, pescatori nell’area mediterranea dal medioevo all’età contemporanea (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2010); Gilbert Buti et al., eds., Moissonner la mer. Économies, sociétés et pratiques halieutiques méditerranéennes, xve–xxie siècle (Paris/Aix-en-Provence: Karthala/MMSH, 2018).

24. In a considerable body of literature, we should mention Richard C. Hoffmann, “Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems in Medieval Europe,” American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (1996): 631–69; Richard W. Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Marco Armiero, “La risorsa contesa : norme, conflitti e tecnologie tra i pescatori meridionali (xix sec.),” Meridiana 31 (1998): 179–206; Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); Margaret Bettie Bogue, Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783–1933 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); Paul D’Arcy, The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2006); Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea (Washington/London: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2007); Bo Poulsen, Dutch Herring: An Environmental History, c. 1600–1860 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008), reviewed by Michael-W. Serruys, Annales HSS 78, no. 2 (2023): 384–86; Matthew McKenzie, Clearing the Coastline: The Nineteenth-Century Ecological and Cultural Transformations of Cape Cod (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2010); Brian J. Payne, Fishing a Borderless Sea: Environmental Territorialism in the North Atlantic, 1818–1910 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010); Daniel Faget, Marseille et la mer. Hommes et environnement marin, xviiie–xxe siècle (Rennes/Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Rennes/Presses universitaires de Provence, 2011); W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), reviewed by Romain Grancher, Annales HSS 78, no. 2 (2023): 379–81; Joseph Christensen and Malcolm Tull, ed., Historical Perspectives of Fisheries Exploitation in the Indo-Pacific (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014); Romain Grancher, “Les usages de la mer. Droit, travail et ressources dans le monde de la pêche à Dieppe (années 1720–années 1820)” (PhD diss., Université de Rouen, 2015); Daniel Faget, L’écaille et le banc. Ressources de la mer dans la Méditerranée moderne, xvie–xviiie siècle (Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 2017); Jakobina K. Arch, Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment in Early Modern Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018); Samuel P. Hanes, The Aquatic Frontier: Oysters and Aquaculture in the Progressive Era (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019); Solène Rivoal, Les marchés de la mer. Une histoire sociale et environnementale de Venise au xviiie siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 2022), reviewed by Robin Quillien, Annales HSS 78, no. 2 (2023): 391–93.

25. Daniel Pauly, “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 10, no. 10 (1995): 430.

26. Michaela Barnard, Poul Holm, and David J. Starkey, eds., Oceans Past: Management Insights from the History of Marine Animal Populations (London: Earthscan, 2008); Poul Holm et al., “Marine Animal Populations: A New Look Back in Time,” in Life in the World’s Oceans: Diversity, Distribution, and Abundance, ed. Alasdair D. McIntyre (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 3–23; Jeremy B. C. Jackson, Karen E. Alexander, and Enric Sala, Shifting Baselines: The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries (Washington: Island Press, 2011); James H. Barrett and David C. Orton, eds., Cod and Herring: The Archaeology and History of Medieval Sea Fishing (Oxford/Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2016); Poul Holm et al., “The North Atlantic Fish Revolution (ca. AD 1500),” Quaternary Research 108 (2019): 1–15.

27. For an overview of these debates, see Katharine Anderson, “Does History Count?” Endeavour 30, no. 4 (2006): 150–55; Bolster, “Opportunities in Marine Environmental History,” 580–82; Christine Keiner, “How Scientific Does Marine Environmental History Need to Be?” Environmental History 18, no. 1 (2013): 111–20; as well as the response by Poul Holm et al., “HMAP Response to the Marine Forum,” Environmental History 18, no. 1 (2013): 121–26.

28. A rich intellectual history of fisheries management developed in the wake of Tim D. Smith, Scaling Fisheries: The Science of Measuring the Effects of Fishing, 1855–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See in particular Helen M. Rozwadowski, The Sea Knows No Boundaries: A Century of Marine Science Under ICES (Copenhagen/Seattle: International Council for the Exploration of the Sea/University of Washington Press, 2002); Carmel Finley, All the Fish in the Sea: Maximum Sustainable Yield and the Failure of Fisheries Management (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), reviewed by Fabien Locher, Annales HSS 78, no. 2 (2023): 424–26; Jennifer Hubbard, “In the Wake of Politics: The Political and Economic Construction of Fisheries Biology, 1860–1970,” Isis 105, no. 2 (2014): 364–78; and Fabien Locher, “Neo-Malthusian Environmentalism, World Fisheries Crisis, and the Global Commons, 1950s–1970s,” in “Malthusian Moments,” special issue, Historical Journal 63, no. 1 (2020): 187–207.

29. Ryan Tucker Jones, “Running Into Whales: The History of the North Pacific from Below the Waves,” American Historical Review 118, no. 2 (2013): 349–77; Demuth, Floating Coast; Sharika D. Crawford, The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Tamara Fernando, “Seeing Like the Sea: A Multispecies History of the Ceylon Pearl Fishery 1800–1925,” Past & Present 254, no. 1 (2022): 127–60; and Fernando, “Mapping Oysters and Making Oceans in the Northern Indian Ocean, 1880–1906,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 65, no. 1 (2023): 53–80. One source of inspiration amongst others (ranging from animal studies to the anthropology of “interspecies entanglements” practiced by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing) is Michel Callon, “Éléments pour une sociologie de la traduction. La domestication des coquilles Saint-Jacques et des marins-pêcheurs dans la baie de Saint-Brieuc,” L’Année sociologique 36 (1986): 169–208.

30. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

31. David Feeny et al., “The Tragedy of the Commons: Twenty-Two Years Later,” Human Ecology 18, no. 1 (1990): 1–19.

32. For example, E. Paul Durrenberger and Gísli Pálsson, “Ownership at Sea: Fishing Territories and Access to Sea Resources,” American Ethnologist 14, no. 3 (1987): 508–22; James M. Acheson, The Lobster Gangs of Maine (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988); and Rob van Ginkel, “The Abundant Sea and Her Fates: Texelian Oystermen and the Marine Commons, 1700 to 1932,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, no. 2 (1996): 218–42.

33. To mention only French-language references, see Annie-Hélène Dufour, “Poser, traîner : deux façons de concevoir la pêche et l’espace,” Bulletin d’Écologie humaine 5, no. 1 (1987): 23–45; Claude Fay, “Repères technologiques et repères d’identité chez les pêcheurs du Macina (Mali),” in Jeux d’identités. Études comparatives à partir de la Caraïbe, ed. Marie-José Solivet and Dinana Rey-Hulman (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994), 167–202; Stéphane Bouju, “Anthropologie et halieutique : réflexion sur l’élaboration d’une typologie et sur l’intérêt de l’utilisation de la notion de technotope,” in Questions sur la dynamique de l’exploitation halieutique, ed. Francis Laloë, Hélène Rey, and Jean-Louis Durand (Paris: ORSTOM, 1995), 245–62; Marie-Christine Cormier-Salem, “Paysans-pêcheurs du terroir et marins-pêcheurs du parcours. Les géographes et l’espace aquatique,” L’Espace géographique 24, no. 1 (1995): 46–59.

34. Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Guillaume Calafat, Une mer jalousée. Contribution à l’histoire de la souveraineté, Méditerranée, xviie siècle (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2019).

35. On conflicts relating to fishing rights, see in particular McCay, Oyster Wars; Micah S. Muscolino, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Renaud Morieux, “Anglo-French Fishing Disputes and Maritime Boundaries in the North Atlantic,” in Governing the Sea in the Early Modern Era: Essays in Honor of Robert C. Ritchie, ed. Peter C. Mancall and Carole Shammas (Los Angeles: Huntingdon Library Press, 2015), 41–75; Nadin Heé, “Negotiating Migratory Tuna: Territorialization of the Oceans, Trans-War Knowledge and Fisheries Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 44, no. 3 (2020): 413–27.

36. Jesse C. Ribot and Nancy Lee Peluso, “A Theory of Access,” Rural Sociology 68, no. 2 (2003): 153–81.

37. Aliette Geistdoerfer, “Connaissances techniques et patrimoines maritimes,” in “Pouvoir et patrimoine au village. Deuxième partie,” special issue, Études rurales 65 (1977): 49–58; Paul Jorion, “Les deux concepts fondamentaux de la pêche artisanale. La ‘saison’ et le ‘métier’ à Houat (Morbihan),” in “Ethnologie maritime,” special issue, Ethnologie française 9, no. 2 (1979): 135–46; Dufour, “Poser, traîner”; Gísli Pálsson, “Enskilment at Sea,” Man 29, no. 4 (1994): 901–27. For an analysis that qualifies this technically mediated relationship with the sea and gives pride of place to fishermen’s bodies and affects, see Artaud, Immersion, 69–77.

38. This notion is borrowed from Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Hélène Vérin, who edited the volume of articles Réduire en art. La technologie de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Paris: Éd. de la MSH, 2008).

39. Marie Roué, “Histoire et épistémologie des savoirs locaux et autochtones. De la tradition à la mode,” Revue d’éthnoécologie 1 (2012): https://doi.org/10.4000/ethnoecologie.813; Artaud, Immersion, 154–64. For a historical perspective on these debates, see Brian Payne, “Local Economic Stewards: The Historiography of the Fishermen’s Role in Resource Conservation,” Environmental History 18, no. 1 (2013): 29–43.

40. From amongst the abundant literature, see in particular Nigel Haggan, Barbara Neis, and Ian G. Baird, eds., Fishers’ Knowledge in Fisheries Science and Management (Paris: UNESCO, 2007); as well as the pioneering work of Robert E. Johannes, Words of the Lagoon: Fishing and Marine Lore in the Palau District of Micronesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Robert E. Johannes and Keneth Ruddle, eds., The Traditional Knowledge and Management of Coastal Systems in Asia and the Pacific (Jakarta: UNESCO, 1985).

41. Romain Grancher, “Le tribunal de l’amirauté et les usages du métier. Une histoire ‘par en bas’ du monde de la pêche (Dieppe, xviiie siècle),” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 65, no. 3 (2018): 33–58; Florian Grisel, The Limits of Private Governance: Norms and Rules in a Mediterranean Fishery (London: Hart Publishing, 2021), reviewed by Yannick Bosc, Annales HSS 78, no. 2 (2023): 413–15; Solène Rivoal, “Expertise et normes professionnelles : le rôle des pêcheurs vénitiens,” in Dans les règles du métier. Les acteurs des normes professionnelles au Moyen Âge et à l’époque moderne, ed. Phillipe Bernardi, Corine Maitte, and François Rivière (Palermo: New Digital Frontiers, 2020), 201–19. Following Edella Schlager, “Coastal Fishery Dilemmas and Fishers’ Institutional Responses,” in Rules, Games and Common Pool Resources, ed. Elinor Ostrom, Roy Gardner, and James Walker (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 247–65, we can note that this customary law is by no means limited to problems of resource conservation, but also aims to prevent and regulate potential conflicts within fleets, for example after an accident on the fishing grounds or over a disputed catch—the most emblematic case being that of the international standards governing the capture of cetaceans. On this last point, see Robert Deal, The Law of the Whale Hunt: Dispute Resolution, Property Law, and American Whalers, 1780–1880 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

42. Robert E. Johannes, “Traditional Marine Conservation Methods in Oceania and Their Demise,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 9, no. 1 (1978): 349–64; Tamatoa Bambridge, The Rahui: Legal Pluralism in Polynesian Traditional Management of Resources and Territories (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2016); Daniel Faget et al., “Les pêcheries de Bahiret El Bibane. Une histoire contemporaine des pêches tunisiennes,” Rives méditerranéennes 64, 2023): 105–36; Faget, Marseille et la mer, 29–35; Romain Grancher, “Knowledge from Experience: The Making of Fisheries Policy (France, 1680–1860),” Annales HSS (English Edition): 10.1017/ahsse.2024.14.

43. For example, Fabien Locher, “Reconstruire la pêche française. État, écologie et modernisation (1939–1958),” Le Mouvement social 1, no. 278 (2022): 73–88; and Hugo Vermeren, “Maritime Sovereignty, the Territorialization of Islands and the Integration of Fishermen in Colonial Tunisia (La Galite),” Coastal Studies & Society 2, no. 2 (2023): 196–215.

44. Alison Bashford, “Terraqueous histories,” Historical Journal 60, no. 2 (2017): 253–72; Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, “Afterword: Land–Sea Regimes in World History,” in A World at Sea: Maritime Practices and Global History, ed. Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 186–92; Romain Grancher and Michael-W. Serruys, “Changes on the Coast: Towards a Terraqueous Environmental History,” Journal for the History of Environment and Society 6 (2021): 11–34.