How did Marine Life Affect and Alter Societies of the Past? 

This is one of the key questions the EU-funded 4-OCEANS Project will seek to answer by investigating the importance of marine life for human societies during the last two millennia, from 100 BCE to 1860 CE. Bringing together expertise from marine environmental history, climate history, natural history, geography, historical ecology, genomics and zooarchaeology, the project will conduct the first-ever global assessment of the role of marine life in societal development and will consider how selected socio-economic, cultural and environmental forces limited as well as enabled marine exploitation.

Historical Geographies of Marine Exploitation (Click to Access Page)

• First Research Question: 

When and where was marine exploitation of major significance to human society?

1. Marine event horizons (MEH) comparable to the c.1000 CE North European fish event horizon have occurred elsewhere.

• Extraction moved from local subsistence to larger operations to feed, clothe, light and warm a wider human population.

2. MEHs are potentially followed by accelerated marine exploitation (AME), a step change into big hunts:

• Defined as large-scale commercial exploitation of marine resources for markets prevailing in large interconnected (e.g. imperial) systems, up to and into the globalising world.

3. An inexorable trajectory of targeting larger fauna and “fishing down” the food web followed MEHs.

4. Global centres of marine consumption developed as nodes of novel marine wealth redistribution and intensified the oceanic reach of globalising seafood trades.

Social and Oceanic Impacts, Conflicts (Click to Access Page)

• Third Research Question: 

What were the consequences of marine exploitation for societal development and the oceans?

8. The long-term success of marine resource use depended on how societies consumed, traded, and socially metabolized marine wealth.

• Marine pathways conditioned societies in distinct ways. They might create deep linkages between coast and hinterland, conditioned path dependencies, and broke such dependencies across the transects and taxa.

• Marine resources were socially metabolized for multiple purposes such as food, clothing and energy;

• And might involve socioecological teleconnections.

9. Marine wealth was much more widely distributed than landed wealth

• Whereas agricultural estates and mineral wealth tended to be concentrated in the hands of an elite and left conspicuous testimony of consumption, marine wealth was likely to be distributed in a wide network of middling merchants and investors.

10.  Sudden peaks and troughs of marine resource availabilities might cause profound economic, social, cultural and political impacts.

11. The impacts of marine extraction not only drove the global economy but played a major role in politics and society.

• Ocean resources generated immense geopolitical interest, and conflicts over access and domination left a deep and conflicted legacy.

12. The extraction of marine wealth, from artisanal to large-scale, concurrently impacted the resource base itself.