The dominant images of the First World War are of a land war fought in the trenches of north-western Europe. Yet the war was ‘as much a war of competing blockades … as of competing armies’.1 These blockades aimed at interdicting enemy powers’ seaborne trade and the shipping that carried it, which the ‘first wave of globalization’ had placed at the heart of the economies of Europe and North America.2 No belligerent power was more dependent on trade and shipping than Great Britain, and it would therefore be difficult to overstate their importance to the British and Allied war effort. Moreover, shipping, ‘the world’s key industry’, as one recent study has termed it, was the one major British industry situated on the front line, directly and constantly exposed to enemy action.3

Vessels belonging to British state departments and private individuals were worked by a labour force that was relatively large, cosmopolitan and mobile in the context of early modern Britain. Second only to agriculture with regard to the number of people employed, this occupational grouping was unusually diverse in respect of age, nationality, race and creed, as well as being marked by comparatively favourable career opportunities and spatial mobility. But it was homogeneous in some respects, for it comprised predominantly male labourers who were employed to a large and exceptional extent on a wage labour basis, a characteristic that has led some to claim that shipping was an exemplar of early modern capitalist development.

Engaging with employers through the workings of a labour market, these seafarers possessed, or were acquiring, the skills and experience necessary to handle, steer, maintain, navigate and occasionally fight a wooden sailing vessel. In the technological setting of the early modern era, such abilities were generally needed to operate all kinds of vessels, and were therefore transferable between sea occupations, enabling seafarers to sell their labour to various types of employers. Whereas many thousands enlisted aboard naval and other state-owned vessels, a significant proportion signed up for voyages in the longdistance, short-sea and coastal trades served by the merchant shipping industry, and others found work in private ships-of-war, inshore and river craft, and fishing vessels. Movement between these occupations was not always straightforward. While it depended to some extent on the personal preferences, competencies and circumstances of individual seafarers, it was also constrained or facilitated by international, national and local laws, government policy instruments and private contractual arrangements, as well as customs and practices that had evolved since medieval times.

Such factors reflected the complementary and sometimes contradictory objectives of the three main parties – the state, shipowners and seafarers – engaged in supplying Britain's military and commercial shipping provision. At the macrolevel, during the 1650–1850 period, the British state adopted a so-called ‘mercantilist’ policy towards trade, shipping and international relations.

Fish is rich in protein, calcium, unsaturated fats and vitamins A, B and D. It has therefore been extracted from its natural environments by humans seeking supplies of food since the earliest times. The transformation of fish into food – of a naturally occurring lifeform into a marketable commodity – has entailed the deployment over many centuries of countless vessels and fishermen to locate and capture a piscine prey that is then returned to land for processing and consumption. This seemingly simple extractive process has had profound ramifications for human societies over the long term, for the quest for fish has driven human predators, carrying with them their beliefs, cultural practices and techniques, to move around the coasts and across the oceans. The development and operation of fishing fleets in the North Atlantic Ocean amply illustrates the significance of this quintessentially maritime activity.

Privateering has been viewed from various perspectives by academic researchers. Historians have tended to focus on the economic and military significance of privateering in particular nations or ports during particular wars or epochs. This not only reflects the character of a business that was generally authorised by, and in theory benefited, nation states during time of war, but also the fact that the documentary evidence underpinning most historical studies was generated by national institutions, chiefly prize courts and admiralties. Within these confines, much of the research effort has been expended on establishing the scale of privateering, generally in terms of the number of vessels commissioned and prizes taken. This has revealed a good deal about the level and impact – in quantitative terms – of private commerce-raiding undertaken in a range of contexts. Much is known, for example, about the private forces set forth by the English during the 1585–1603 and 1625–30 conflicts, the Spaniards operating out of Netherlandish ports from 1621 to 1648,2 the Scots during the 1513–1713 period,3 the French during the wars of Louis XIV, the British in the five wars in which they engaged as belligerents between 1702 and 1783, the British American colonists in the 1740s and the Americans during the 1812–14 war.

Scholars from other disciplines have adopted more theoretical approaches. Thomson, for instance, has examined privateering in the context of the monopolisation of violence at sea by nation states, a long-term gradual process that was largely accomplished by the nineteenth century.

Introduction: ‘The very real minefield of statistics’

Pessimism has been the hallmark of most appraisals of the primary sources relating to the size and composition of the British seafaring labour force before the late nineteenth century. The tone was set by Ralph Davis, who observed in 1962 that the ‘pathway through the shipping statistics of the seventeenth and eighteenth century is a slippery and often misleading one’. Despite acknowledging that ‘researchers in the period after 1750 are well served with official records [relating] to seamen’, an assessment by Sarah Palmer and David M. Williams of the quality of this material was ‘certainly depressing and might even be characterized as defeatist, but it serves to indicate the very real minefield of statistics’ pertaining to seafaring labour before the mid-nineteenth century. Gordon Jackson was likewise less than optimistic in his efforts to quantify the human resource deployed in merchant vessels registered in Scotland from 1772 to 1808. Drawing upon records generated by the Customs service, he concluded that the ‘grand total of men who might well call themselves sailors was never assessed and cannot now be estimated with any degree of confidence’.

Adopting a more positive approach, this chapter assesses the available source material and offers new estimates of the size of the British seafaring population during the 1789-1828 period. While particular attention is afforded to calculating the number of seamen employed in the merchant shipping industry, which has long proved to be the most difficult branch of the sea service to enumerate, the manpower engaged in the Royal Navy, privateering business, inland navigation and inshore fisheries is also quantified. In treading gingerly through this statistical minefield, the present study provides a measure of the development of Britain's maritime interests over a 40-year era, and an appraisal of the impact of two long, intense wars on the scale and composition of the seafaring workforce. It therefore follows in the footsteps of Ralph Davis and David J. Starkey, and will hopefully serve to dispel some of the pessimism that has tended to shroud this aspect of research into work at sea during the age of sail.

The workshop at which the papers that comprise this volume were presented also generated a research agenda for the “History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP)” project. This agenda, in turn, formed the basis of a proposal that subsequently attracted financial support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (New York City). Having commenced in January 2001, the HMAP initiative provides an historical dimension to the “Census of Marine Life,” a decade-long research program designed to assess and explain the diversity, distribution and abundance of marine life in the world's oceans.

HMAP is an international, interdisciplinary research project. It is based in three institutions: the University of Southern Denmark, the University of Hull, UK, and the University of New Hampshire, USA. These HMAP Centres are responsible for co-ordinating and managing the research efforts of more than fifty historians, ecologists and ecosystem modelers working in thirty-one institutions in eighteen countries. The researchers have been recruited to assemble and analyse historical and paleo-ecological data relating to human harvesting in seven distinct spatial contexts over the past 500 years. Their case studies, which will be completed in 2003, will not only yield information on the impact of historic and contemporary fishing activity on ecosystem dynamics but will also develop methodologies that can be applied more widely to other elements of the marine environment. The seven case studies are: Southwest Pacific (southeast Australian shelf and slope fisheries, New Zealand shelf fisheries); Southwest African Shelf (clupeid fisheries in a continental boundary current system); California Current (clupeid fisheries in a continental boundary current system); Northwest Atlantic (Gulf of Maine, Newfoundland-Grand Banks, Greenland cod fisheries); Norwegian, North and Baltic Seas (multinational cod, herring and plaice fisheries); White and Barents Seas (Russian and Norwegian herring, salmon and cod fisheries); and Whaling Worldwide (historical and twentieth-century whaling in all oceans).

The HMAP workshop identified a series of ecological and historical hypotheses that were incorporated into the design of the project.

The current condition of many of the marine animal populations affected both directly and indirectly by the harvesting activities of human societies has been established with some certitude by aquatic and marine ecologists. Much less attention, however, has been afforded to the state of harvested populations beyond comparatively recent times, chiefly because the interests of fisheries ecologists have tended to be contemporary in scope, with less regard paid to historical trends and precedents. Their investigations, moreover, have been dominated by equilibrium-based theories of the impacts of harvesting. The reference points have too frequently been the hypothesized equilibrium state, and too seldom the longterm dynamics of population changes. At the same time, scientific studies of fisheries have often been geared to the fisheries management needs of the day, and these often have narrow regional perspectives. In this context, fisheries historians have so far made little impression. Theirs is an underdeveloped field of enquiry. As a consequence, in comparison with other fields of human production, notably agriculture and manufacturing, there are few substantial overviews of fishing, and those that have been produced adopt a national, regional or port perspective that does not elucidate the problems pertaining to marine basins and oceans. A further deficiency lies in the reluctance of fisheries historians to consider the natural environment on which fishing effort is both dependent and has a considerable impact. Historians have therefore tended to neglect the development of marine animal populations (the history of nature itself) and often lack the tools and theories to account for the fluctuations in harvests that have occurred in commercial fisheries. Historical reference points are thus important in two respects: while they offer ecologists information about the factors controlling marine populations, they also provide evidence for those historians concerned with the significance that harvesting the oceans has held for many human societies.

This volume is conceived as an attempt to correct some of these deficiencies. In combining the approaches of maritime history and ecological science it contributes to the field of environmental history, which has emerged in recent years as a distinctive branch of historical enquiry. The key to this new area of study is the integrated analysis of ecosystems and human societies, in particular the place of mankind in the historical development of ecosystems.

Abstract

This paper views the prosecution of the Newfoundlandfishery, c. 1500-1900, from a British perspective. It considers the range, quality and utility of the evidence on the fishery in English archives and primary printed sources. The qualitative information provided by practitioners, observers and pamphleteers is examined initially. The discussion thenfocusses on the quantitative material relating to the fishery from the late seventeenth century onwards available in the Colonial Office papers in the Public Record Office. Some tentative results from preliminary analyses of these statistical data are presented. These indicate that the quantity of fish harvested in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fluctuated widely but generally increased through the period, attaining levels higher than previous estimates have shown. The catch rate is also examined to test the relationship between catch, effort and stocks. Notwithstanding the quality and volume of the primary sources, the paper concludes by suggesting that a greater research effort in the English archives will yield the data necessary to construct a rounded study of the impact of human prédation on the fish stocks of Newfoundland.

Historians of the fisheries conducted from the British Isles have two main obstacles. First, this is a vast subject, due not just to its ubiquitous nature but also to the complex range of activities involved. At any given time many types of fisheries were prosecuted. While there were marked regional variations in technique, catch and market, numerous contrasting forms might be conducted concurrently from a single port or locality. Second, there are practical problems regarding the collection and interpretation of data, for the primary sources relating to Britain's fisheries are extensive, take many different forms and are scattered in repositories throughout the UK and beyond. The evidence is also uneven, both temporally (comparatively little relates to the pre-1700 period) and topically - some fisheries, and some ports, generated more, or more useful, records.

The fishery and fish trade conducted by Britons (largely Englishmen) from Newfoundland illustrates these problems. While this distinctive trade has received more attention from historians than most British fishing interests, the factors governing its scale, character and significance are still imperfectly understood. This is partly due to the complexities of the political, economic, social and environmental issues that arise in examining it. But it also reflects the abundance, deficiencies and idiosyncrasies of the primary records pertaining to the business.

Gordon Jackson has identified “the need to connect trains and ships in a sensible manner” as one of the more important factors that conditioned the development and organisation of Britain's ports in the nineteenth century. Some places made this connection with more alacrity than others. While there were ports such as Grimsby and Birkenhead that were purposely built or redeveloped to facilitate the movement of cargo from railway truck to ship's hold as efficiently as possible, there were many instances of port authorities, dock owners and local government institutions adapting existing provisions to accommodate and exploit the arrival of the railway. Yet the response of some ports to the opportunities presented by the new transport mode was decidedly slow, usually as a consequence of political in-fighting between entrenched vested interests. Hull was one of these stragglers. Indeed, such was the intensity of the disputes that engulfed dock construction and railway links that Hull was poorly served in both respects until the mid-1880s - forty years after the opening of the city's first railway connection - when a consortium of port users promoted the Hull and Barnsley Railway. As Jackson observed, “while many railway companies built ports, Hull appears to have been the only port which built a major railway in self-defence.“

A further dimension to the relationship between trains and ships and ports lay in the ownership and operation of steamers by railway companies. Such integration of services was a common and logical feature of Britain's transport provisions from the 1860s, especially in ports where packet services across the English Channel and the North and Irish Seas were based. While Hull did not pioneer such enterprise, in the 1890s the North Eastern Railway Company (NER) began investing in steamship services between Hull and the “near-continental” ports, an interest that developed significantly in 1906 with the incorporation of the Wilsons and North Eastern Railway Shipping Company Limited (WNERSC). Jointly promoted with Thos. Wilson Sons and Co. Ltd. (TWSC), this was an unusual form of railway steamship enterprise in which shipping expertise and railway capital were combined in a mutually-beneficial alliance.

The WNERSC was a modest venture. Often referred to by Oswald Sanderson, chairman from its birth until his death in 1926, as “our little company,” the firm operated independently until 1935, experiencing many of the crises and rewards that marked British shipping during this era.

The internationalization of the world economy has been one of the defining characteristics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A direct result of European expansionism and industrialization, this process has been facilitated by, and has stimulated, profound improvements in transportation and communications. While revolutions in land, air and sea transport have played a significant part in extending the scope of economic activity, remarkable advances in the means of information dissemination have greatly expedited the flow of intelligence and data upon which the business decisions of producers and consumers are based. Due to such developments, the world has become smaller in a metaphorical sense; but, at the same time, the spatial expansion of the world's commodity, labour and capital markets has been such that they have become literally global in extent.

Global Markets is concerned with the part that the sea transport industries have played in this process. Such a subject area provides an excellent vantage point from which to examine the emergence and development of the international economy, for the sea transport industries, by their very nature, are both intrinsic to, and influenced by, the economic and political interactions between nations. Accordingly, studies of shipping and shipping-related activities provide insights into the nature of phenomena which are labelled, often very imprecisely, “internationalization“ and “globalization.” The former is directly derived from the concept of the nation state, though it implies rather more than the simple exchanges between bordering states that the term “international” might be taken to mean. Instead, internationalization implies a process of becoming, an ongoing evolution entailing the emergence of multilateral, spatially dispersed and regular links between nations. This gradual process is well illustrated by the pace and pattern of the geographical spread of shipping routes from the mid-nineteenth century (see Wray's chapter). “Globalization” is more contentious. While not all observers accept the validity of the concept, some arguing that if anything it forms simply a phase in the internationalization process (Johnman), those who view it as a distinct phenomenon offer different interpretations as to its meaning, scope and location in an historical context (Greenhill, Scholl, Jarvis, Goto).