The great transformation at sea: Fictitious commodities and the crisis of marine fisheries

This dissertation employs theoretical insights developed by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation to the catastrophic decline of fisheries. The global capture of fish expanded after 1945; aided by technology and massive investment, the per capita fish supply grew from 8kg in 1950 to over 15kg in 1996. By 1990 fish supplied approximately 16% of all animal protein for human consumption and is also an important agricultural feedstock. Technological progress has not been matched with development of adequate capabilities in conservation; the United Nation's FAO estimates about 60% of the world's fishery resources are in decline or fully exploited. In the Northwest Atlantic, decades of over-exploitation devastated once immense stocks; the resulting industrial crisis caused widespread economic distress as the fishery was reduced to the marine cognate of a dustbowl.; Polanyi's theory of capitalist development is applied to two case studies, pelagic whaling and the Northwest Atlantic fishery and examines the evolution of the political economy of the fishery along with its contemporary integration with the global agro-foods complex. Karl Polanyi is rarely credited as an ecologist, yet his theory of capitalist development was prescient in identifying the ecological consequences of capitalism and provides a profound mode of analysis for technological and environmental studies; his examination of the impact of the machine upon society, the subordination of all the elements of society and nature to the needs of the market and the transformation of human thinking implicit in the shift to capitalism provides a range of theoretical insights that are fruitfully applied to the analysis of the political economy of the fishery. This research challenges orthodox accounts of international relations through the deployment of a historical materialist methodology and is directed at the development of theoretical innovations which can draw from social theory and a broad range of disciplines including ecology and technology studies to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the global political economy and its contemporary transformation.