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Paper short abstract

This paper revisits E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act and discusses the relevance of Thompson’s approach to law for questions and conflicts surrounding contemporary wildlife management.

Paper long abstract

This paper revisits E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act and discusses the relevance of the book for questions surrounding contemporary regimes of wildlife management, its attendant forms of enclosure, and the contestations that surround it.

Thompson’s study famously challenged instrumental accounts of law by demonstrating how “the Black Act” during the eighteenth-century enclosure movement in England was deeply imbricated in productive relations, and how law was a complex terrain for social struggles over livelihood, property, and customary rights.

By drawing on ethnographic material from fieldwork in the commercial fisheries in coastal Louisiana, and on historical insights on legislative transformations in fishery governance across the Gulf Coast states, my paper discusses the relevance of Thompson’s work and what it visibilizes in a context shaped by emerging environmentalism, socio-ecological transformations, and ecological volatility.