Government and Resource Conservation: the Salmon Acts Administration, 1860-1886

Abstract

No area of Victorian administrative history is more richly documented or less adequately explored than that concerning the development of public policy by professional or scientific “specialists” within the civil departments of Government. Traditionally, texts on the evolution of the modern state have concentrated upon the role of political philosophy, economic motivation, and parliamentary expedience in determining the direction and timing of government involvement in the private sector. In recent years, however, there has been a growing interest in the anatomy and function of institutional change within the so-called “Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government.” Now a number of attempts are being made to describe the manner in which science, technology, and “special professional knowledge” were used administratively by the state to conserve and protect the wealth of the nation.The Salmon Acts administration reveals this phenomenon of development particularly well. These acts embodied what one contemporary observer called the first permanent attempt by Parliament to protect and regulate private property in the public interest. Their administration involved the first permanent staff appointed to supervise the fisheries of England and Wales and laid the foundations for British nature conservancy policy. Government intervention in the salmon fisheries followed different lines of development in Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales during the course of the century. The following pages, however, will be confined to salmon administration in England and Wales during the period 1860-86, in what was essentially the “heroic age” of policy-making by the salmon inspectors at the Home Office and the Board of Trade.