1. See, Lydon, James G., “Fish for Gold: The Massachusetts Fish Trade with Iberia, 1700–1773,” New England Quarterly 54 (Dec., 1981): 539–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. McCusker, John J. and Menard, Russell R. The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), Table 5.2, p. 108.Google Scholar

3. Indeed, Daniel Vickers maintains that the Massachusetts fisheries were synonymous with the New England fisheries in the colonial period. Vickers, , Farmers and Fisherman: Two Centuries ofWork in Essex County, Massachusetts, 16307#x2013;1830 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 154.Google Scholar

4. Wilkie, Richard W. and Tager, Jack, eds., Historical Atlas of Massachusetts (Amherst, Mass., 1991), 25.Google Scholar

5. Vickers, , Farmers and Fisherman, Table 4, p. 154.Google Scholar A quintal is a unit of weight equal to 100 kilograms.

6. Mahan, Alfred Thayer, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 (1890; New York, 1987), 1.Google Scholar Emphasis is my own.

7. Israel, Jonathan I., The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806, 4^th ed. (Oxford, U.K., 1998);Google Scholar Mattingly, Garrett, The Armada (Boston, 1959);Google Scholar and Wilson, Charles, Profit and Power: A Study of England and the Dutch Wars (London, 1957).Google Scholar

8. For general overviews, see Labaree, Benjamin W., Fowler, William M., Sloan, Edward W., Hattendorf, John B., Safford, Jeffrey J., and German, Andrew W., America and the Sea: A Maritime History (Mystic, Conn., 1998);Google Scholar and Albion, Robert G., Baker, William A., and Labaree, Benjamin W., New England and the Sea (Mystic, Conn., 1972).Google Scholar

9. See, Smith, Simon D., “Gedney Clarke of Salem and Barbados’s Transatlantic Super-Merchant,” New England Quarterly 76 (Dec. 2003), 499–549;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hunter, Phyllis Whitman, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bailyn, Bernard, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1955);Google Scholar and Baxter, William T., The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, 1724–1775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1945).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. For more on the role of women, see Norling, Lisa, Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000);Google Scholar Crane, Elaine Forman, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800 (Boston, 1998).Google Scholar Also, see Young, Alfred F., “The Women of Boston: ‘Persons of Consequence’ in the Making of the American Revolution,” in Women & Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution, eds. Applewhite, Harriet B. and Levy, Darline G. (Ann Arbor, 1990), pp. 181–226.Google Scholar For more on shipping and mariners, see Vickers, Daniel, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers In the Age of Sail (New Haven, Conn., 2005);Google Scholar Bolster, W. Jeffrey, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1997);Google Scholar Bailyn, Bernard and Bailyn, Lotte, Massachusetts Shipping, 1697–1714: A Statistical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For more on lumbering and shipbuilding, see Clark, Charles E., The Eastern Frontier: The Settlement ofNorthern New England, 1610–1763 (New York, 1970);Google Scholar Goldenberg, Joseph A., Shipbuilding In Colonial America (Charlottesville, Va., 1976);Google Scholar and Albion, Robert Greenhalgh, Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1652–1862 (Cambridge, Mass., 1926).Google Scholar

11. Norling, , Captain Ahab Had a Wife; Vickers, Daniel, “Nantucket Whalemen in the Deep-Sea Fishery: The Changing Anatomy of an Early American Labor Force,” Journal of American History 72 (Sept. 1985): 277–96;Google Scholar Kugler, Richard C., “The Whale Oil Trade, 1750–1775,” in Seafaring In Colonial Massachusetts, 153–74;Google Scholar and Stackpole, Edouard A., The Sea Hunters: The New England Whalemen During Two Centuries, 1635–1835 (Philadelphia, 1953).Google Scholar

12. Wright, Conrad Edick and Viens, Katheryn P., eds., Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700–1850 (Boston, 1997);Google Scholar Tyler, John W., Smugglers & Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston, 1986);Google Scholar Frese, Joseph R., , S.J., “Smuggling, the Navy, and the Customs Service, 1763–1772,” in Seafaring In Colonial Massachusetts, 199–214;Google Scholar Labaree, Benjamin W., Patriots and Partisans: The Merchants of Newburyport, 1764–1815 (New York, 1975);Google Scholar Barrow, Thomas C., Trade and Empire: The British Customs Service in Colonial America, 1660–1775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967);Google Scholar Sosin, Jack M., Agents and Merchants: British Colonial Policy and the Origins of the American Revolution, 1763–1775 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1965);Google Scholar Dickerson, Oliver M., The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1954);Google Scholar Baxter, , House ofHancock; and Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York, 1918).Google Scholar

13. McFarland, Raymond, A History ofthe New England Fisheries (New York, 1911).Google Scholar

14. Vickers, Farmers and Fisherman. Harold Adams Innis also discussed the New England cod fishing industry in the elaboration of his staple thesis. See, Innis, Harold Adams, The Codfisheries: The History of an International Economy (New Haven, Conn., 1940).Google Scholar However, Innis’ primary focus is on Newfoundland, not New England.

15. McFarland devotes only one chapter to the Revolution and Vickers only a few comments. Indeed, Vickers has recently asserted that “the locals” in colonial Marblehead, Massachusetts were “cautious about political engagement” and remained “more nervous about engaging in radical action” during the Revolution. See, Vickers, Daniel, “Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age ofSail: A Roundtable Response,” International Journal of Maritime History 17 (Dec. 2005): 365.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Exceptions include Gilje, Paul A., Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia, 2004);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Linebaugh, Peter and Rediker, Marcus, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000);Google Scholar Lemisch, Jesse, Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York’s Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution (New York, 1997);Google Scholar Stout, Neil R., The Royal Navy In America, 1760–1775: A Study ofEnforcement ofBritish Colonial Policy In the Era ofthe American Revolution (Annapolis, Md., 1973);Google Scholar Jensen, Arthur L., The Maritime Commerce of Colonial Philadelphia (Madison, Wis., 1963).Google Scholar Most of these otherwise excellent works do not address the commercial fishing industry in colonial America. Gilje does briefly discuss the industry, but he does not attempt to link the business history of the fisheries to the Revolution.

17. See, for example, Miller, Nathan, Broadsides: The Age of Fighting Sail, 1775–1815 (New York, 2000);Google Scholar Gardiner, Robert, ed., Navies and the American Revolution, 1775–1783 (London, 1996);Google Scholar Maritime Dimensions of the American Revolution (Washington, D.C., 1977) (author’s note: this a thirty-six page pamphlet consisting of two short conference papers devoted to the US Navy and three brief comments); Jr.Fowler, William M., Rebels Under Sail: The American Navy During the Revolution (New York, 1976);Google Scholar Miller, Nathan, Sea of Glory: A Naval History of the American Revolution (Charleston, S.C., 1974);Google Scholar Clark, William Bell, George Washington’s Navy: Being An Account of his Excellency’s Fleet in New England (Baton Rouge, La., 1960);Google Scholar Allen, Gardner Weld, A Naval History of the American Revolution, Vols. 1–2 (Boston, 1913);Google Scholar and Paullin, Charles Oscar, The Navy of the American Revolution: Its Administration, Its Policy, and Its Achievements (Chicago, 1906).Google Scholar

18. See, for example, Claghorn, Charles E., Naval Officers of the American Revolution: A Concise Biographical Dictionary (Metuchen, N.J., 1988);Google Scholar and Morison, Samuel Eliot, John Paul Jones, A Sailor’s Biography (Boston, 1959).Google Scholar

19. Jr.Buel, Richard, In Irons: Britain’s Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary Economy (New Haven, Conn., 1998).Google Scholar Also, see Syrett, David, The Royal Navy In American Waters, 1775–1783 (Brookfield, Vt., 1989).Google Scholar For the French Navy, see For the French Navy, see , Jonathan R., Dull, The French Navyand American Independence: A Study ofArms and Diplomacy, 1774–1787 (Princeton, N.J., 1975).Google Scholar

20. See, Cogliano, Francis D., American Maritime Prisoners in the Revolutionary War: The Captivity ofWilliam Russell (Annapolis, MD., 2001);Google Scholar Ubbelohde, Carl, The Vice-Admiralty Courts and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960);Google Scholar Middlebrook, Louis F., Maritime Connecticut During the American Revolution, 1775–1783, Vols. 1–2 (Salem, Mass., 1925);Google Scholar and Howe, Octavius Thorndike, Beverly Privateers In The American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1922).Google Scholar

21. Roger Morriss provides a two-page introduction to “Colonial seafaring” in Gardiner, ed., Navies and the American Revolution, 12–14. Morriss briefly acknowledges that fishing was part of the colonial maritime tradition (p. 13), but the connections between the commercial fisheries and the Revolution are left unexplored. Such a cursory nod to the fishing industry is common among naval histories.

22. For more on the concept of “terra-centrism,” see Rediker, Marcus, “Toward a People’s History of the Sea,” in Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century eds., Killingray, David, Lincoln, Margarette, and Rigby, Nigel (Rochester, N.Y., 2004), 195–206.Google Scholar

23. Typical of this view is Don Higginbotham, who discusses “the provincialism,” “the rural isolation, the traditions of localism,” that defined “a predominantly agrarian society.” He also maintains “the War of Independence was for Americans mainly a defensive type of struggle waged on the patriots’ soil.” Soldiers in the Continental Army, we are told, “were mainly farmers, blacksmiths, tanners, and artisans.” Higginbotham, Don, War and Society in Revolutionary America: The Wider Dimensions of Conflict (Columbia, S.C., 1988),Google Scholar 7, 11, 12, 13, 21.

24. Alfred F. Young attributes this historical approach to Jesse Lemisch. Young, ,“An Outsider and the Progress of a Career in History,” William and Mary Quarterly 52 (July 1995): 505.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Lemisch, Jesse, “The American Revolution Seen from the Bottom Up,” in Toward a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History,ed. Barton Bernstein (New York, 1968), 3–45.Google Scholar

25. For a path-breaking study linking labor and military histories in a study of the eighteenth-century British Army, see Way, Peter, “Rebellion of the Regulars: Working Soldiers and the Mutiny of 1763–1764,” William and Mary Quarterly 57 (Oct. 2000): 761–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26. Accounts of the rise of Atlantic history can be found in Bailyn, Bernard, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005);Google Scholar Mancke, Elizabeth and Shammas, Carole, eds., The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore, Md., 2005),Google Scholar especially the introduction by Carole Shammas, 1–16; Armitage, David, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, eds. Armitage, David and Braddick, Michael (London, 2002), 11–27 Google Scholar, 250–254; Canny, Nicholas, “Atlantic History: What and Why?,” European Review 9, no. 4 (2001): 399–411;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Linebaugh, and Rediker, , Many-Headed Hydra; and Karras, Alan L., “The Atlantic World as a Unit of Study,” and McNeill, J.R., “The End of the Old Atlantic World: America, Africa, Europe, 1770–1888,” both in Atlantic American Societies, eds. Karras, and McNeill, (London, 1992), 1–15 and 245–68.Google Scholar