What Do We Get Out of it? Extractivism in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, 1759-1856

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

In the 2012 work The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail W. Jeffery Bolster wrote that “By shifting time scales to the realm of history, and by concentrating on documentable and remembered phenomena, the living ocean, in all its vastness and vulnerability, becomes connected to human societies in intimate and time-specific ways.” Twelve years later historians have come a long way to conceptualize time and space differently at sea. This panel explores the benefits of situating oceans history scholarship with that of coastal, or littoral, history. Recently those interested in the study of marine spaces, such as the Gulf of St. Lawrence have become increasingly aware that current historical frameworks are increasingly difficult to situate alongside a growing body of historical evidence. Primary sources such as nautical charts, and surveying journals used by the papers in this panel provide a window into the social and environmental relations of the time. Using the Gulf of St. Lawrence as an analytical vantage point, we are able to address important subjects such as: settler-Indigenous relations; the British Navy and the Admiralty’s role in seeking information to understand the local environment, and the extraction and qualification of environmental knowledge of the ocean depths and the projection of power. Both the world’s oceans and coastlines have been sites of socio-environmental extraction, production, and speculation that have shifted the very understanding of the human experience.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Commercial Enterprises, Extractivism, and Contested Space in the Gulf of St. Lawrence Region - Glenn Iceton, Mount Allison University

• Masters of the Gulf: Admiralty Understandings of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, circa 1759-1815 - Erin Spinney, University of New Brunswick (Saint John)

• Expressions of Extraction in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence: Environmental Knowledge, and Henry W. Bayfield, 1827-1856 - Zachary Tingley, University of New Brunswick; Joshua MacFadyen, University of Prince Edward Island

Chair

• Jack Bouchard, Rutgers University - New Brunswick