The rise and fall of inexhaustible seas

Abstract This article reconstructs the rise and declining authority of the theory of inexhaustible sea fisheries from the pre-industrial period to 1945. Taking Britain as the principal case and fisheries and whaling as distinct but comparable systems of marine extraction, it examines how biology, technology, markets, political economy, evidence, and regulation shaped interpretations of marine abundance. Inexhaustibility is treated not as a formal population-dynamic theory, but as an influential proposition that the great offshore food fisheries could not be materially and persistently reduced by contemporary fishing, or that available evidence did not justify general restraint. Industrial expansion complicated this threshold: greater fishing power, distant-water operations, preservation, processing, and imports could sustain landings while obscuring changes in catch rates, size composition, voyage length, and cost. Whaling made regional depletion and geographical relocation more visible because slowly reproducing animals, identifiable grounds, recorded catches, shore stations, and factory ships linked extraction more directly to declining availability. Garstang’s effort-adjusted critique, research associated with the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), Hjort’s recruitment analysis, wartime contrasts, and interwar work on growth, mortality, effort, yield, and capacity progressively displaced practical inexhaustibility. By 1945, the scientific and regulatory problem had been reorganised around the conditions and coordination of exploitation.