Taming the Seas: Empires of Fishing, Colonization and Ecological Collapse in the Western Pacific

Abstract

In 2020 Chinese "dark fleets" replaced North Korean "ghost ships" in international discourse as symbolic of a certain form of global maritime threat and disturbance. This article takes a longer view of trouble on the high seas, looking back to the globalization of the oceanic commons at the behest of post 1945 geopolitics and new forms and methodologies of fisheries science. With Carmel Finley's articulation of Pacific Empires of Fishing in mind the article explores fishing histories of East Asia and the Pacific, both during and after the era of colonization The article considers the marginalization of already peripheral traditional Korean fishing communities by Japanese colonization, ecological collapse generated by the technological and statistical development underpinning scientific fishing, and the ghosts made of fish themselves as the powers and logics of accumulation and extraction transform the watery geographies of the Pacific.