Labor, Landscape, and Four Virginia Watermen

• Published in: The Journal of southern history Vol. 88; no. 2; pp. 257 - 290
• Main Authors: Taylor, Jessica, Daglaris, Patrick
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Houston The Southern Historical Association 01.05.2022; Southern Historical Association
• Subjects: 19th century; 20th century; African Americans; Demographics; Demography; Economic aspects; Employment; Fish; Fishers (Persons); Fishing; Historians; Knowledge; Seafood; Self employment; Social aspects; Sport fishing; United States; United States > US; Maryland; Virginia; Chesapeake Bay
• ISSN: 0022-4642; 2325-6893; 2325-6893
• DOI: 10.1353/soh.2022.0055

The waters and banks of the York River and the Chesapeake Bay teemed with steamships and industrial fish-packing houses and canneries; the docks were crowded with families and crews of men moving crates of colorful watermelons, cantaloupes, and daffodils.4 Mechanization, demographics, and fluctuating fish populations and profits changed the historical landscape. [...]studies of the U.S. seafood industry demonstrate that the relationship between watermen, politics, and science and technology is complex under the surface.8 From Mississippi to Nova Scotia, watermen faced threats like suburbanization in their coastal communities, shifting fish populations, predatory corporations and processors, and pushback from environmentalists and recreational fishermen. Historians argue that, mirroring agricultural shifts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, members of fishing communities navigated painful choices about whether to embrace or to fight privatization, major seafood corporations, and new technologies.10 Some scholars suggest that in particular historical moments, watermen played into a tragedy-of-the-commons story, overharvesting and precipitating long-term declines in catches that echo stories of agricultural decline, while other historians and anthropologists have demonstrated that communal exploitation was not the ultimate cause of such declines.11 Moreover, in building regional seafood industries, white watermen captured and perpetuated inequities in the workforce, devaluing the work of women on boats as just "for fun" and relegating Black and brown watermen to the lowest-paid positions with few opportunities for advancement.12 All watermen carried regional, racial, gendered, and capitalist baggage into a global market. Watermen are neither isolated nor provincial, and the salt water and its harvest connect them to national conversations.