The troubled seas of Spanish fishermen: marine policy and the economy of change

Abstract

In tracing the evolution of the Spanish‐Moroccan fishery, this paper seeks to illuminate the ways in which the social economy of Spanish fishermen structures its response to the industrialization and internationalization of fisheries. The paper makes two connected arguments. First, it argues that the investigation of change must relate the structural principles that have produced the social economy to the structural conditions and demands in which the social economy seeks to reproduce itself. Second, in analyzing the interplay between local and international forces, it argues that the analysis of modern Mediterranean societies—as exemplified by fisheries—entails a vertically integrated description that transcends the mutual isolation of ethnographic and geopolitical perspectives.