Shawn
I revisited Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky and it still holds up. What sounds like a niche topic turns into a surprisingly wide-ranging history of exploration, trade, religion, and technology, all orbiting around one humble fish. Kurlansky does a great job showing how cod helped shape the Atlantic world—from feeding European populations and Caribbean plantations to fueling early American commerce—before modern industrial fishing pushed the species to the brink.
What I like most is how the book reads almost like a detective story. For centuries cod seemed limitless, but the combination of bigger ships, better nets, and global markets slowly removed every natural limit that once protected the fishery. The collapse of the Grand Banks fishery in the late twentieth century becomes the inevitable ending to a story that had been building for hundreds of years.
It’s a great example of how a microhistory can illuminate a much bigger picture. Kurlansky starts with a fish and ends up explaining how humans tend to treat any abundant resource—discover it, build an economy around it, assume it will last forever, and then scramble once it’s gone. Informative, engaging, and still very relevant today
I revisited Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky and it still holds up. What sounds like a niche topic turns into a surprisingly wide-ranging history of exploration, trade, religion, and technology, all orbiting around one humble fish. Kurlansky does a great job showing how cod helped shape the Atlantic world—from feeding European populations and Caribbean plantations to fueling early American commerce—before modern industrial fishing pushed the species to the brink.
What I like most is how the book reads almost like a detective story. For centuries cod seemed limitless, but the combination of bigger ships, better nets, and global markets slowly removed every natural limit that once protected the fishery. The collapse of the Grand Banks fishery in the late twentieth century becomes the inevitable ending to a story that had been building for hundreds of years.
It’s a great example of how a microhistory can illuminate a much bigger picture. Kurlansky starts with a fish and ends up explaining how humans tend to treat any abundant resource—discover it, build an economy around it, assume it will last forever, and then scramble once it’s gone. Informative, engaging, and still very relevant today