Casting the net: early Atlantic fisheries and colonial expansion, 15-16th centuries

Abstract

This article explores the role played by commercial, oceanic fisheries in European expansion into the Atlantic basin across the 15th-16th centuries. The article uses the examples of Iceland, Rio do Ouro and Terra Nova as representative of the new fishing operations, and explains how they functioned as resource extraction systems. In looking at this history, it argues that these fisheries served as crucial food production centers, forms of colonial occupation, fuel sources for expansion, and new resource frontiers. This article ultimately suggests that the new Atlantic fisheries were crucial to the construction of a new European world-ecology in the early period of Atlantic expan-sion, and formed a vital part of the new colonial systems.