All the Boats on the Ocean: How Government Subsidies Led to Global Overfishing by Carmel Finley

Abstract

633 Reviews White and male.) Moreover, commercialization dramatically altered labor resources, as the harvest-time hands of family members and neighbors gave way to floating multitudes of “unskilled” hop-pickers, often drawn from the lowest ranks of society, whose wages were based on the weight of their hauls and the color of their skin. This was especially true in the American West, where the labor of a kaleidoscope of pickers — Indigenous, Asian, European, and American — accentuated the fault lines of race and class. Finally, Kopp argues that from the landing of the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay to the initial rise of the Willamette Valley as the “Hop Center of the World,” the North American beer industry underwent a staggering level of Europeanization , only to return the favor by the turn of the twentieth century. Readers familiar with W.J. Rorabaugh’s The Alcoholic Republic (1979), a social history with remarkable staying power, will follow Kopp’s periodization with keen interest. By the mid nineteenth century, the palates and proficiency of German and Irish immigrants, along with the practices of temperance advocates, helped transform the United States into a nation of beer drinkers. Temperance reformers perceived German lager beer to be an acceptable, if temporary, alternative to rotgut in what had become a nation of drunkards. The Midwest became the center of American brewing, and the most enterprising hop growers and brewers sought to perfect local and regional hops that might compete on the world stage. This led them to the Northwest. Kopp’s most difficult work, and it is admirable , is in describing the transplantation and cultivation of hops in the Northwest during and after the antebellum period, where the historical evidence is fragmentary at best. Fort Vancouver, at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers, provides the earliest documentary evidence of hops cultivated for sale, as the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) governor George Simpson and chief factor John McLaughlin included the crop in shipments to provision Russian fur traders in Sitka, Alaska. Despite HBC policies against imbibing the fruits of their labor, anecdotal evidence suggests that fur traders did more than sell this “brewer’s gold.” The Gilded Age ascendance of the Willamette Valley as the nation’s leading hops producer helped some Oregon businesses endure the Prohibition years through crop and marketing diversification, and yet, exports continued in a global capitalist market unfazed by moral reform. After repeal, towns such as Independence responded to demand (the “hop rush”) by pioneering hop festivals to both attract workers and celebrate community, even if the “heritage” portrayed at these events suffered from Anglo historical amnesia. The post– World War II industrialization of the industry brought challenges to Oregon in the form of downy mildew and competition from corporate giants with their bland, seemingly hop-less macrobrews. Nevertheless, the partnerships formed in this period among growers, brewers, U.S. Department of Agriculture geneticists, and academic researchers (primarily from Oregon State University) led to the cultivation new hops varieties that would become staples of the craft beer revolution, long after the Yakima Valley had eclipsed the Willamette Valley in hops production. Ryan Dearinger Eastern Oregon University ALL THE BOATS ON THE OCEAN: HOW GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES LED TO GLOBAL OVERFISHING by Carmel Finley University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2017. Illustrations, notes, index. 224 pages. $45.00, cloth. Anyone who visited an Oregon beach during the early 1970s likely remembers huge ships hovering just beyond the twelve-mile limit of American sovereignty. Few saw those ships up close, but everyone knew they belonged to a 634 OHQ vol. 118, no. 4 vast Russian fleet that constituted half the tonnage of the global industrial fishery. For most residents and tourists, the ships made tangible the abstract specter of a Cold War enemy. For fishers, however, the Russians were taking all of their halibut, rockfish, and salmon. This is how many North Americans learned about the globalization of industrial fishing, but by then, the fishery’s expansion was decades old and stretched from the Barents Sea to the Southern Ocean, from the Caribbean to the Benguela Bight, and from Micronesia to the horizon off McPhillips Beach in 1971. The economic and ecological impact...