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Historical Fishing Communities

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Abstract

Community-building is one tool of human resilience to overcome the challenges of a hostile environment such as the marine. The chapter provides an overview of how the concept of community has been deployed in historical and social anthropology studies of maritime communities since the 1920s. Two main insights come out of this study, Firstly, the theoretical consciousness borne out of disciplines such as sociology, social anthropology and ethnography are valuable assets in the context of marine environmental history, and deserves to be considered in more historical studies than what has been the case so far.

Secondly, while many community studies have been occupied with fishing communities in the nineteenth and twentieth century there is much to be gained from following a community based approach in contemporary marine environmental history studies. Yet, the very fact that in the twenty-first century the fishing effort of the industrialized world is concentrated on ever fewer vessels operated by ever fewer people provides a discussion point in relation to whether or not the community concept will continue to be a fruitful analytical category.

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Acknowledgement

The author gratefully acknowledges a EURIAS fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study which provided perfect conditions for research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Poul Holm

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  1. Poul Holm
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Correspondence to Poul Holm .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ecology (ZMT), Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine, Germany

    Kathleen Schwerdtner Máñez

  2. Aalborg University, Denmark

    Bo Poulsen

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Holm, P. (2016). Historical Fishing Communities. In: Schwerdtner Máñez, K., Poulsen, B. (eds) Perspectives on Oceans Past. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7496-3_3

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