Morgan Hardy

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Changes in the Sea: Eighteenth-Century New England Innovations in Fisheries Sustainability

Environmental histories of New England follow a narrative that laments the loss of pristine nature because of commercial exploitation. My dissertation shifts the focus from the harmful effects of merchant capitalism to earlier, pre-industrial challenges that forced fishers and fish merchants to develop strategies to make commercial fishing more sustainable. This work explores these strategies and their implementations in eighteenth-century commercial fisheries. Despite their lack of success, these innovations trouble the declensionism by showing that early Americans were invested in protecting the fisheries and the sea.