Black Monday, 1894: Saltfish, credit, and the ecology of politics in Newfoundland

ABSTRACT

Recent work in political ecology and more-than-human geography has highlighted the foundational role that nonhumans play in actively shaping politics. More than simply resources over which humans wage political battles, this work contends that nonhumans must be considered political actors in their own right. Building on this research, this paper examines a political-economic crisis in the Dominion of Newfoundland: the bank crash of 1894. I demonstrate how this ostensibly political and economic crisis was also critically ecological. I examine how it was shaped by the material properties of saltfish, as both dead codfish and a living microbial community. This paper contributes to Atlantic studies by emphasizing the nonhuman agency of fish and ocean-space in the constitution of maritime political economies.

KEYWORDS:

• Political ecology
• political economy
• more-than-human geography
• nonhuman agency
• fisheries
• North Atlantic
• Newfoundland

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Rocio G. Davis for her editorial guidance, and the two reviewers for their generous feedback and deep engagement with the material. I would also like to thank my supervisor and hall-mate Kurt Korneski for the continuous, rolling conversations about academia and Newfoundland history. This paper is stronger for it. Naturally, all errors, omissions, infelicities, and blunders are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Daniel Banoub completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Manchester and is currently the ISER Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Memorial University. His research examines the political economy of resource extraction in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, with a focus on fisheries, aquaculture, and mining.

ORCID

Daniel Banoub http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1925-0360

Notes

1 Sider, Between History and Tomorrow, ch. 9.

2 Bavington, “From Hunting Fish,” 510–511.

3 Hutchings, “Evolutionary Biology,” 899; Hutchings and Myers, “The Biological Collapse,” 41; and Roberts, The Unnatural History, 32–43.

4 Anspach, A History of the Island, 399.

5 Inspired by Smith, Uneven Development, 7.

6 Smith, Uneven Development; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; Merchant, The Death of Nature; and Moore, Capitalism.

7 For the classic take, see: Bakker and Bridge, “Material Worlds?”

8 Regarding the resource curse, see: Le Billon, “The Resource Curse”; Owusu, “Doomed by the ‘Resource Curse?’”; Ross, “What Have We Learned about the Resource Curse?”

9 Mitchell, “Carbon Democracy,” 407.

10 Huber, Lifeblood, 62.

11 Ibid., xix.

12 See also: Mitchell, “The S.U.V. Model of Citizenship.”

13 Huber, Lifeblood, xvi.

14 Bridge, “Resource Geographies II.”

15 Ibid. See also: Elden, “Land, Terrain, Territory”; Huber, “Resource Geography II.”

16 Andreucci et al., “‘Value Grabbing’”; Huber, “Resource Geography II,” 6.

17 McGuire and Reckner, “The Unromantic West”; Lause, The Great Cowboy Strike.

18 Barua, “Lively Commodities”; “Nonhuman Labour”; “Volatile Ecologies”; Braun, “Inventive Life”; Collard, “Putting Animals Back Together”; Collard and Dempsey, “Life for Sale?”; Dempsey, “Tracking Grizzly Bears”; Margulies and Bersaglio, “Further Post-Human”; and Whatmore, “Materialist Returns.”

19 Bakker, An Uncooperative Commodity.

20 Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Braun, “Inventive Life”; Greenhough, “Vitalist Geographies,” 38.

21 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

22 For a comprehensive review, see Hayden Lorimer’s three progress reports in PiHG on cultural geography.

23 Choi, “More-than-Human Geographies of Nature,” 620.

24 Braun, “Inventive Life,” 670.

25 Barua, “Lively Commodities,” 6; Braun, “Inventive Life,” 667; Collard and Dempsey, “Life for Sale,” 2684; Greenhough, “Vitalist Geographies.”

26 Van Dooren, Flight Ways, 2–3.

27 Dempsey, “Tracking Grizzly Bears,” 1142.

28 Barua, “Animating Capital,” 3. Buller (“Animal Geographies I”, “Animal Geographies II”, “Animal Geographies III”) and Hovorka (“Animal Geographies I”, “Animal Geographies II”, “Animal Geographies III”) offer synoptic reviews of the animal geographies literature.

29 Barua, “Animating Capital.”

30 Collard, “Disaster,” 913; Collard and Dempsey, “Capitalist Natures in Five Orientations.”

31 Arboleda, “Revitalizing,” 373.

32 Van Dooren, Flight Ways, 4, 9–10. I owe this insight to one of the peer reviewers of this paper.

33 Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 194. See also: Marx, Capital, Vol. 2, 256. For a discussion of the difference between “process” and “motion” in Marxist political economy, see: Danyluk, “Capital’s Logistical Fix,” 644.

34 Daily News (DN), “From The Daily News of Over Sixty Years Ago,” 26 October 1956, 5.

35 Murray, The Commercial Crisis in Newfoundland, 2.

36 DN, “Notes on the Crisis,” 10 December 1894; Memorial University Archives (MUNA), Coll-237, Box 23, File 9.01.042, “The Newfoundland Bank Trials” by P. T. McGrath in The National Magazine, September 1896, 565.

37 Hickey, “The Immediate Impact,” 12; Hiller, “A History of Newfoundland,” 291.

38 The Rooms Provincial Archives Division (TRPAD), GN 1/3/A, Box 25, File 1, George H. Emerson to Governor Terence O'Brien, 10 December 1894.

39 MUNA, Coll-237, Box 23, File 9.01.042, “The Newfoundland Bank Trials,” 565.

40 Prowse, A History of Newfoundland, 536.

41 MUNA, Coll-237, Box 23, File 9.01.042, “The Newfoundland Bank Trials,” 566.

42 MUNA, Coll-237, Box 23, 9.01.041, “The Economic Condition of Newfoundland” by Dr. Moses Harvey, 1896, 138.

43 Ibid.

44 Bright, “Through Memory’s Eyes,” 27.

45 Ibid.

46 MUNA, Coll-237, 9.01.002, Box 22, Governor Terence O’Brien to Marquess of Ripon, 10 December 1894.

47 MUNA, Coll-237, 9.01.002, Box 22, Ripon to O’Brien, 11 December 1894.

48 MUNA, Coll-237, 9.01.002, Box 22, Ripon to O’Brien, 19 February 1895. For a definitive analysis of Newfoundland’s crisis of democracy in the 1930s, see: Neary, Newfoundland in the North Atlantic World.

49 Earle, “The Bank Crash of 1894,” 2; O’Flaherty, Lost Country, 186; MUNA, Coll-237, Box 23, 9.01.015, “The Commercial Collapse of Newfoundland” by A.R. Whiteway, 1895, 3.

50 Hiller, “A History of Newfoundland,” 295.

51 Hale, “The Newfoundland Lesson,” 56–57; Innis, “Newfoundland, Economic and Political III,” 83.

52 O’Flaherty, Lost Country, 187.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 DN, “The People Speak,” 2 January 1895, 4.

56 DN, “Trouble in the City,” 9 January 1895, 4; Evening Telegram (ET), “The Crisis,” 10 January 1895, 4; DN, “The City to-day,” 11 December 1894, 4.

57 Horan, “Bank Crash,” 122.

58 ET, “MADNESS!” 12 December 1894, 4.

59 Ibid.

60 MUNA, Coll-237, 9.01.002, Box 22, Ripon to O’Brien, 5 March 1895.

61 MUNA, Coll-237, Box 23, 9.01.041, Harvey, 143.

62 Department of Fisheries, Annual Report for 1895, 49–51.

63 Prowse, A History of Newfoundland, 550.

64 Ibid., 142.

65 MUNA, Coll-237, Box 23, 9.01.041, Harvey, 139.

66 There is an immense literature in Newfoundland studies on the social and economic implications of the credit system. For an introduction to the debates in Newfoundland historiography, see Ommer, Merchant Credit. For a more general perspective, see Hilton, The Truck System.

67 Kurlansky, Cod, 34.

68 Lodge, Dictatorship in Newfoundland, 62.

69 Ibid., 63.

70 DN, “Assets and Liabilities,” 11 December 1894, 4. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, “Water Street” referred metonymically to the merchant class, with the same connotations as “Wall Street” in the US or “The City” in the UK.

71 DN, “Notes on the Crisis,” 13 December 1894, 4. See also: Lodge, Dictatorship, 62.

72 MUNA, Coll-237, 9.01.002, Box 22, O’Brien to Ripon, 10 December 1894.

73 DN, “Assets and Liabilities,” 11 December 1894, 4.

74 MUNA, Coll-237, 9.01.002, Box 22, O’Brien to Ripon, 10 December 1894.

75 Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 310.

76 Hjort, “Fluctuations,” 1.

77 Finley, All the Fish, 5–6.

78 Larkin, “Fisheries Management,” 60.

79 Ghaly et al., “Fish Spoilage,” 859.

80 Macpherson, The Dried Codfish Industry, 16; Mukundan et al., “A Review on Autolysis.”

81 Macpherson, The Dried Codfish Industry, 18.

82 Waterman, The Cod.

83 Ghaly et al., “Fish Spoilage,” 861.

84 TRPAD, MG 73, Box 11, File 11, “Reports RE – Fish Export Regulations,” Mr. Dunfield, 3 February 1920, 3/38.

85 TRPAD, MG 73, Box 8, File 7, S.C. Coish to W.B. Grieve, 30 March 1917. See also: TRPAD, MG 73, Box 8, File 5, E.A. Payn to President, British Chambers of Commerce, Genoa, 17 May 1917; TRPAD, MG 73, Box 8, File 5, A.H. Murray and W.A. Munn to W.B. Grieve, 26 April 1917; TRPAD, MG 73, Box 8, File 8, “Resolution passed by the Newfoundland Board of Trade on 11 May 1917.”

86 Newfoundland, Report, 64.

87 TRPAD, MG 73, Box 11, File 11, “Reports RE – Fish Export Regulations,” Mr. Barr, 3 February 1920, 3/6.

88 TRPAD, MG 73, Box 11, File 11, “Reports RE –Fish Export Regulations,” Mr. Brookes, 3 February 1920, 3/30.

89 TRPAD, MG 73, Box 11, File 11, “Reports RE – Fish Export Regulations,” Mr. Barr, 5 February 1920, 5/42.

90 Cullen, “Race, Debt, and Empire.”

91 Christophers, “Geographies of Finance I,” 288.

92 Marx, Capital, Vol. 2, 182.

93 Bright, “Through Memory’s Eyes,” 27.

94 Steinberg, The Social Construction, 11–20.

95 Clark, “Romancing the Harlequins,” 14.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 753-2013-0640] and the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland.