Contribution short abstract:

My contribution would draw from my research into the British Colonial Fisheries Advisory Committee, which centred on developing, exploiting, and regulating fisheries towards an optimum yield in the coastal and inland waters throughout the British empire.

Contribution long abstract:

My research focuses on fisheries governance within the context of British colonialism, interrogating how science, law, and development converged in blueprints to exploit and control marine resources throughout the British empire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

For this panel, I would particularly draw from my research into the Colonial Fisheries Advisory Committee (CFAC), which operated between 1943 and 1961, and focused on ‘optimising’ and ‘developing’ fisheries throughout the British empire. CFAC concentrated on advancing research into fish biology and stock health while encouraging a programme of fisheries technology transfer. In this vision for fisheries development, nutritional concerns were paired with commercial development and conservationist regulations, in which fish were recognised as crucial sources of protein for coastal and inland communities but were perceived to be underexploited or harvested using inefficient and unsustainable methods.

Crucially, CFAC was instituted at a time when the major principles and approaches of fisheries science developed and became embedded within Western-oriented fisheries management regimes. This centred on attaining an optimum yield—where ‘optimum’ meant optimum long-term economic potential—by maximising yields to a level that did not cause declining stocks. From the colonial perspective, the scene was set whereby the idea of an optimum yield provided the groundwork for fisheries development programmes based on scientific research and assumptions of centralised control over natural resources.

In contributing to the roundtable, I would focus on the discourses of scarcity, rational management, and science-based solutions surrounding global fisheries that influenced CFAC’s activities and vision.