The Industrial Revolution generated a vast array of inventions that could be applied to the capture of fish. The most obvious of these was mechanical power. A boat powered by a steam engine or an internal combustion engine could be used to tow non-motorized boats to the fishing ground and to carry catches to market while the fishing boats remained at sea. When the fishing boat itself had mechanical power, the engine could supplement or even take the place of wind and muscle to carry fishers to their prey and power the boat as a fishing gear was being set or towed behind the boat. Mechanical power made it possible to think of using old fishing gears on a larger scale, modifying old fishing gears or even introducing new ones to take greater advantage of the potential it created. At the same time more efficient pumps, more powerful forms of lighting, and more powerful explosives created still more possibilities for exploiting marine resources. There was nothing automatic about the adoption of these new technologies, however. Whether fishers or investors made use of new technology largely depended on whether it brought sufficient profits to outweigh the cost of acquiring and operating it. This in turn depended on how much could be caught with the new technology, the size of the market, and the price of the product in that market. When an official suggested to a fisher in Kelantan “that he should buy an outboard motor which was not very dear” so that he could return home with his catch early in the morning rather than having to wait until noon for the sea breeze to come or to battle a headwind, “he told me he had insufficient money to purchase one”. On the other side of the Malay Peninsula one fish dealer experimented with a motorized fish carrier but gave it up after a year “as not sufficiently remunerative”, while another whose “motor boat was not decked and so dangerous when the sea grew even moderately rough” abandoned the experiment after a few months. In these circumstances states often took the lead in experimenting with new technologies or supporting private investors who wished to do so. The extent to which they did this varied greatly, however.

The late 1970s and early 1980s may be taken as an important turning point in the history of the extension of the frontier of fishing in Southeast Asian waters. It was at this time that the Indonesian government banned trawl fishing in most of the sea under its jurisdiction and that governments throughout Southeast Asia claimed their offshore waters as exclusive economic zones. Both events, arising as they did out of conflict over access to living marine resources, indicate that the period of freewheeling extension was ending. During the 1980s and into the 1990s the demand for fish products continued to grow rapidly. The population of Southeast Asia — the single most powerful source of demand — grew at 2 per cent a year to 480 million in 1995, while living standards rose as the economies of many countries, particularly Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, were restructured towards the export of manufactured goods. At the same time, the economic success of Taiwan and Hong Kong and the emergence of a class of rich business people in the People's Republic of China renewed the centuries’ old demand from China for the marine exotica of Southeast Asia, and the markets for tuna and shrimp continued to grow in Japan, North America, and Europe. At least in the short term this growing demand was matched by increasing catches. Between 1980 and 1997 nominal fish landings rose from 5.8 to 11 million tons, contributing (along with supplies from freshwater sources, aquaculture, and imports) to a general increase in the per capita supply of fish to the people of Southeast Asia. There were, however, limits to how much the sea could yield to meet the ever-increasing demand. During the 1990s total landings increased less rapidly than they had during the 1980s. In the Philippines, the first country to take part in the fish race, landings ceased to increase during the 1990s, while in Thailand, the second country to join the race, they increased much less rapidly than they had during the previous three decades. This slowing took place even though, as we shall see, large-scale operators in both countries landed large quantities of fish caught in the waters of other countries.

In 1850 Southeast Asia had a population of just forty million or so. The greatest concentrations of population were in Java (with perhaps a quarter of the total), Madura, Bali, the rice basins of the Menangkabau highlands of west Sumatra, the dry zone of the Irrawaddy, the flood plain of the Chao Phraya, the coast of Vietnam, Luzon, and southwest Sulawesi. There were pockets of population in the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, and Malacca and numerous small sultanates in the island world from Aceh in the west to Ternate in the east. In contrast, large sections of Southeast Asia such as much of the area along both sides of the Straits of Malacca, most of Borneo, and most of the eastern island world were very sparsely populated. The great majority of the people of the region were peasant farmers, growing rice and other food crops for their own consumption and usually producing food and other goods for their overlords as well. A very small proportion of the population lived in cities and towns or worked in mines and plantations. The people of the region lived within or on the fringes of a very large number of political units in which power was, at least from our vantage point, highly decentralized, though less so in the few areas then under colonial rule such as Java, the Straits Settlements, Luzon, and the Visayas than in most of the rest of the region. In this world of scores of polities and thousands of islands a powerful unifying influence was the sea. It was by sea that people travelled long distances, and it was by sea that nearly all the long-distance trade was conducted, not only within the region but also with China, India, and Europe. Trade in sea-going sailing vessels and, by 1850, a tiny number of steamships was the lifeblood of such port cities as Singapore, Batavia, Surabaya, Makassar, and Manila.

And it was the sea that provided animal life that people exploited both for food for themselves and for products that they could trade with others. For many people the capture of marine life was not their main activity. They were primarily agriculturalists and fished when planting and harvesting did not demand their full attention. For others, however, fishing was their main source of livelihood.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century catches of marine animals in Southeast Asia began to increase so that by the 1930s they were several times what they had been in 1850. In order to understand the rise in catches we must first step back and look at the political and economic transformation that took place at this time, for it was in the context of this transformation that catches increased.

The political and economic transformation

In 1850 Southeast Asia was made up of many dozens of states and statelets in which power tended to be decentralized. In the latter part of the nineteenth century the colonial powers — the British based in the Straits Settlements and Rangoon, the Dutch based in Batavia, the French from their foothold in Saigon, and first the Spanish and then the Americans based in Manila — and the Thai monarchy cantered on Bangkok extended their reach over more and more territory. In some places this was achieved by military force, as in the case of the incorporation of Aceh into the Netherlands Indies and much of Vietnam into French Indochina, while in others it was accomplished by treaty. However it was done, by 1910 virtually all of Southeast Asia was brought within the boundaries of one of these states. Even more importantly, these states were motivated by a desire to control the activities of the people within their boundaries and, increasingly, they acquired the means to exercise this control. This transformation did not happen immediately. In fact, one of the features of states in the late nineteenth century was their heavy reliance on the practice of leasing out, usually to Chinese businessmen, monopolies (“farms”) for the collection of certain taxes and the sale of goods such as opium; as far as fisheries is concerned, the most important of these farms was the farm which the Netherlands Indies government granted for the right to sell salt to the fish processors of Bagan Si Api Api in Sumatra. By 1920, however, governments had developed bureaucracies staffed by specialists in a great variety of fields that enabled them to impose their will far more than states had been able to do just a few decades earlier.