Article ID: CBB655984497

The Overfishing Problem: Natural and Social Categories in Early Twentieth-Century Fisheries Science (2021)

unapi

This article looks at how fisheries biologists of the early twentieth century conceptualized and measured overfishing and attempted to make it a scientific object. Considering both theorizing and physical practices, the essay shows that categories and understandings of both the fishing industry and fisheries science were deeply and, at times, inextricably interwoven. Fish were both scientific and economic objects. The various models fisheries science used to understand the world reflected amalgamations of biological, physical, economic, and political factors. As a result, scientists had great difficulty stabilizing the concept of overfishing and many influential scholars into the 1930s even doubted the coherence of the concept. In light of recent literature in history of fisheries and environmental social sciences that critiques the infiltration of political and economic imperatives into fisheries and environmental sciences more generally, this essay highlights both how early fisheries scientists understood their field of study as the entire combination of interactions between political, economic, biological and physical factors and the work that was necessary to separate them.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB655984497/

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Authors & Contributors
Moore, P. G.
Bocking, Stephen A.
Bolster, W. Jeffrey
Ervynck, Anton
Finley, Carmel
Franklin, H. Bruce
Journals
Antiquity
Archives of Natural History
Der Anschnitt: Zeitschrift für Kunst und Kultur im Bergbau
Environmental History
História, Ciências, Saúde---Manguinhos
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Publishers
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Breakwater Books
Island Press/Shearwater Books
Oxford University Press
University of Chicago Press
University of Nebraska Press
Concepts
Fisheries; fishing
Fishes
Environmental sciences
Archaeology
Ships and shipbuilding
Environmental history
People
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Williamson, Henry Charles
Kyle, Henry Macdonald
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
Medieval
20th century, early
21st century
Ancient
Places
Europe
United States
Scotland
Atlantic Ocean
Great Britain
Chile
Institutions
International Council for the Exploration of the Sea
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