Introduction

• Main Author: Earle, Thomas Blake
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Cornell University Press 2023
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501768927.003.0001

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the centrality of fisheries in US politics during the first century of the United States' existence. Cod fishing in places like the Bay of Fundy, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the Grand Banks operated as a central facet of US statecraft for much of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the phrase “fisheries issue” serves as shorthand for the series of questions that surrounded US commercial fishing in the North Atlantic. Internationally, the question was one of who could fish where, while domestically, the central question concerned the degree to which the US state would support the fishing industry both politically and economically. How the federal state addressed those questions shows the extent to which the state could and did use its power. From the American Revolution through the Civil War, the fisheries were a central concern in Anglo-American relations, tacking with the ups and downs, the cooperation and confrontation that defined the United States' most important foreign relationship.