The History and Historiography of Fisheries in the Age of the “Oceanic Turn”

Fishing, the last practice of exploiting nature based on the large-scale predation and commercialization of wild animal resources, has not always received the attention it deserves from the social sciences in terms of its ecological, anthropological, and historical significance. 1 Studies devoted to the subject, long confined to narrowly specialized and spatially compartmentalized subfields of research such as maritime history and anthropology, have remained comparatively niche. 2 The fact that a generalist journal such as the Annales has devoted an entire special issue to the history of fishing worlds is therefore significant. It is a sign of the increased recognition and visibility of the many studies currently being carried out on the subject, and also an indication of a new interest in the ocean, or at least of a different way of looking at it. 3 Until recently, most historical accounts were written about or from dry land. 4 This “default” land-based perspective began to be criticized and then countered in the 2000s, particularly in the context of reflections on the Anthropocene. Over the last two decades, the liquid part of the globe has become an object and a field of investigation in its own right, to the point that this decentering (or refocusing, depending on one’s perspective) has been described by its proponents as a genuine “oceanic turn.” 5 The novelty, amplitude, and radical nature of this shift still need to be qualified. Nevertheless, as the anthropologist Hélène Artaud has shown in a recent book, 6 studies “of the sea” are currently demonstrating a hitherto unprecedented level of reflexivity, contributing to a different perception of the ocean: no longer an empty, virgin, and threatening space, but an inhabited, transformed, and threatened environment.