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.

This article is based on an analysis of some thirty fishing experiments carried out on the coast of the English Channel between the 1680s and the 1860s. It describes the early development of an experimental way of governing marine resources under the ancien régime, followed by its gradual normalization over the course of the nineteenth century. As the article shows, the fishing policies designed to ensure the conservation of these resources were the result of negotiation between the French ministry of the Navy and fishing communities, whose monopoly on the production of fishing knowledge enabled them to defend their technical and legal specificities.

This article focuses on an exceptional primary source—nearly eighty letters addressed to the crew of a single French ship captured during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) but never read, as their still-sealed envelopes attest. Letters to sailors, which helped maintain relations endangered by distance and uncertainty over whether they would return, offer clues to the resilience of familial bonds in wartime. Rather than interpreting these documents as a sign of the emergence of the nuclear family and modern intimacy, they are here approached as an object of social history. This correspondence played a key role in the circulation of information and the survival of familial unity. Letters were not markers of personal, private, and intimate exchanges, but rather part of the very fabric of complex social relations structured by both family ties and neighborliness. Both their writing and their reading engaged multiple individuals well beyond their signatory and their addressee. Ultimately, the article highlights, in their very materiality, the social dynamics that formalized the expression of emotions.