The Herring Enlightenment: Adam Smith and the reform of British fishing subsidies,1783–1799

Abstract

In late eighteenth-century Britain, Adam Smith was the most influential thinker to offer advice on fisheries policy. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that subsidized, offshore fishing vessels were being built to catch subsidies, not fish. He argued that the tonnage bounties, intended to promote an export trade in herring, had instead raised local food prices and destroyed the Scottish small-boat fishery. This article describes the parliamentary inquiries this criticism joined, including whether public subsidies could help to build a British fishery at an appropriate scale. Speculating on the relative role of politics, geography and Enlightenment thinking in the parliamentary debate, it concludes that the herring itself made the public subsidies system succeed. The ‘Grand Shoal’ known in earlier decades reassembled along the Scottish coasts, and catches by vessels of all sizes increased dramatically. When, by 1799, British herring catches equalled the Dutch fishery at its peak, the ‘fickle’ herring made Adam Smith’s experiment in fish policy and politics a success.