In this final volume of the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project, Sager and Panting argue that the decline of the shipping industry was not, as has commonly been assumed, the inevitable result of the conversion from wood and sail to iron and steam. They show that the merchant class, in failing to maintain a merchant marine built and owned in their region, contributed in no small way to the Maritimes' present state of underdevelopment. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Discover more about Biloxi’s proud history as a maritime marvel and leader in America’s seafood industry. Predating even colonial America, Biloxi was established for its welcoming gulf shore both a home for traders and a beacon for explorers of the mainland. Geography made Biloxi a historic maritime hub of trade and travel; the seafood industry made it a vibrant, thriving community. Thanks to the efforts of a variety of diverse ethnic groups, Biloxi was dubbed the “Seafood Capital of the World” at the turn of the century. By the 1920s, there were more than forty seafood factories occupying two bustling cannery districts. Cajuns with deep ties to the region, industrious Croatian immigrants and hardworking Vietnamese émigrés all contributed to Biloxi’s seafood industry. Through the Civil War, devastating hurricanes and shifting economies, these hard-fishing families have endured, building Biloxi and forming its character.

This book provides a study of both the physical and intangible frameworks that enabled maritime resources to flow and infrastructures to operate. The aim is to demonstrate the complexity and diversity of the legal, social, cultural, and institutional forces at work within maritime economics. Port development, planning, and policy-making constitute the physical frameworks, while agency structures and consular networks make up the non-physical factors under discussion. Both land and sea commodities are examined, including capital mobilised from other sectors, and a particularly pertinent maritime commodity, fish. Through case studies, theory-driven analysis, evidence from statistical data, and regional and national comparisons, it successfully illustrates the structure of resource flow and the shape of maritime economic activity on an international scale spanning the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Nations examined include Scotland, England, New Zealand, Italy, Denmark, plus several Nordic and Mediterranean states. The book consists of three sections: the first exploring intangible infrastructures and their components; the second, resource flow and economic development; and, finally, the physical infrastructures of the ports themselves.

Nearly thirty years ago W.S. MacNutt published the first general history of the Atlantic provinces before Confederation. An outstanding scholarly achievement, that history inspired much of the enormous growth of research and writing on Atlantic Canada in the succeeding decades. Now a new effort is required, to convey the state of our knowledge in the 1990s. Many of the themes important to today's historians, notably those relating to social class, gender, and ethnicity, have been fully developed only since 1970. Important advances have been made in our understanding of regional economic developments and their implications for social, cultural, and political life. This book is intended to fill the need for an up-to-date overview of emerging regional themes and issues. Each of the sixteen chapters, written by a distinguished scholar, covers a specific chronological period and has been carefully integrated into the whole. The history begins with the evolution of Native cultures and the impact of the arrival of Europeans on those cultures, and continues to the formation of Confederation. The goal has been to provide a synthesis that not only incorporates the most recent scholarship but is accessible to the general reader. The book re-assesses many old themes from a new perspective, and seeks to broaden the focus of regional history to include those groups whom the traditional historiography ignored or marginalized.