Beyond the Catch

Current concerns about the survival of marine life and the fishing industry have contributed to a rising interest in their past development. While much of the scholarship is focused on the recent past, this collection of essays presents new interpretations in the pre-industrial history of the fisheries by highlighting the consequences of the northern fisheries through an interdisciplinary approach, including the environment, economy, politics, and society in the medieval and early modern periods. A wide variety of topics related to the fisheries, such as settlement and spatial organisation, processing methods, trade, profitability and taxation, consumption, communication and cooperation, ranging from the Viking Age until industrialisation are dealt with in a long term perspective, offering new insights in the intriguing relationship between marine life and humanity.
Contributors are Inês Amorim, James H. Barrett, Christiaan van Bochove, Petra van Dam, Chloé Deligne, Carsten Jahnke, Alison M. Locker, Thomas H. McGovern, Sophia Perdikaris, Marnix Pieters, Peter Pope, Bo Poulsen, Callum M. Roberts, Louis Sicking, Dries Tys, Adri van Vliet, Annette de Wit, Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz.

Louis Sicking is lecturer in history at the University of Leiden. He has published extensively on maritime and overseas history including Neptune and the Netherlands. State, economy, and war at sea in the Renaissance (Brill, 2004) and Colonial Borderlands: France and the Netherlands in the Atlantic in the 19th century,(Brill, 2008).
Darlene Abreu-Ferreira is an associate history professor at the University of Winnipeg. She has published on the early modern Portuguese-Newfoundland cod trade and on early modern Portuguese women. She is presently working on a study of women and crime in early modern Portugal.

"The book they have assembled is admirable. It not only helps correct the neglect of the early commercial fisheries, but also serves to extend the scholarly horizons of fisheries history in temporal, spatial, topical and interdisciplinary directions", DAVID J. STARKEY University of Hull, in Scottish Historical Review, 90/2, 2011, 318-20 DOI: 10.3366/shr.2011.0041