A Fishery for Modern Times: The State and the Industrialization of the Newfoundland Fishery, 1934-1968

John Van West is a senior policy advisor with the Ontario Ministry of
the Attorney General.

In this exceptionally well-written book chronicling the industrial
expansion of the Newfoundland cod fishery from 1934 to 1968, the author
argues that fishing of the northern cod stocks by industrial fishing
interests did not create an expected prosperity for the people of
Newfoundland. On the contrary, the industrial fishery—supported and
promoted by the hegemonic interests of state and capital—precipitated
catastrophic social, political, and economic upheavals that continue to
this day. Primary among these upheavals was the biological collapse of
the cod stocks. (In 1990, the Canadian government placed a moratorium on
commercial fishing to conserve the dwindling cod stocks.)

To gain an understanding of what brought on the collapse, Wright relies
heavily on the writings of Antonio Gramsci and “Gramscian-influenced
scholars.” Gramsci’s notion of hegemony is particularly instructive
in the Newfoundland context, she argues, because it enabled her to
contextualize historical processes and identify the causal factors that
resulted in the fishery’s collapse. According to Wright “[hegemony]
is achieved when the ideas or concepts that generally support the
dominant economic system become universal and are accepted by the wider
population as ‘true’ or ‘common sense.’” Thus, the commonly
held idea that developing a “modernized” Newfoundland fishery would
be in everyone’s best interest—an idea never seriously challenged or
critically examined—in fact resulted in the expansion of an offshore
industrialized fishery that the cod stocks simply could not sustain.
Wright’s persuasively argued book is a valuable object lesson for
those seeking to avert a similar catastrophe from emerging in other
fisheries.