“A Spirit of Encroachment”: Trees, Cod, and the Political Ecology of Empire in the Newfoundland Fisheries, 1763–1783
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the political ecology of dried salt cod production in eighteenth-century Newfoundland fisheries to explore the relationship between resource extraction, law, and imperial rivalry. When France recognized Newfoundland as a British possession in 1713, by treaty French subjects retained the right to operate seasonal cod fisheries along a segment of the island’s shores. The fisheries were valuable not only economically, but strategically as a source of naval recruits. In the aftermath of French defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), a contingent of British officials was dismayed that the peace treaty reaffirmed French fishing rights. Realizing that cod production required a nearby source for wood, they began insisting that French fishermen had rights to extract cod from Newfoundland’s shores but not wood from its forests. Manipulating the extraction nexus of wood and cod became a strategy of empire. French fishermen responded by deepening their ties with the Mi’kmaq, who challenged British dominance in Newfoundland, and by developing smuggling networks with New England merchants. Thus, the British attempt to make French fishing rights meaningless had unintended consequences. The Franco–New England ties proved especially important in the American Revolutionary War. Bringing together environmental and legal history, this article exposes how a resource—in this case wood—could have a value beyond a straightforward economic one in the context of imperial rivalry. In doing so, it argues that the relationship between nature and legal strategies of imperial claims-making was not merely discursive but was rooted in the material conditions of resource extraction and production.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".