Moral Economy of the Commons: Ecology and Equity in the Newfoundland Cod Fishery, 1815-1855‪.‬

Sean Cadigan, "The Moral Economy of the Commons: Ecology and Equity in the Newfoundland Cod Fishery, 1815-1855," Labour/Le Travail, 43 (Spring 1999), 9-42. ECOLOGICAL HISTORY has been less than flattering in its portrayal of the impact of European peoples on the Americas. Older views of the supposed superiority of European migrants have given way to seeing them as one group of organisms among many in a global ecology. Rather than being superior, Europeans simply proved to be the most pestilential and pestiferous of peoples. Their arrival `decimated' and `demoralized' pre-contact indigenous societies. (1) The preoccupation with broadly comparing Europeans' and First Nations' ecological relationships creates a sense of determinism about the emergence of capitalism in colonial society, although the literature has developed the importance of social relationships and culture as well as pests, plants, and animals to European expansion. Europeans' Christian cosmology, market values, and systems of property rights proved much more ecologically destructive than the spirituality, subsistence-orientation, and gift-giving exchanges of the First Nations. In the long run, Europeans could only bring to America the capitalist commodification and subordination of nature. (2)