This set the ground, Kurlansky argues, for the American Revolution. The upshot was that France “held its slave colonies but lost its fisheries,” and subsequently relied on British (that is, New England) cod to feed the slaves on French plantations in the Caribbean. He demonstrates that negotiations over cod-fishing grounds formed the heart of the settlement reached by the British and French governments after the Seven Years’ War. Kurlansky argues that cod has played an underappreciated role in several major historical epochs and events. Kurlansky produces some surprising statistics: for example, by the year 1550, cod made up 60 percent of all the fish eaten in Europe. He tells the little-known story of Britain’s first “cod war,” fought in 1532.

Kurlansky draws on his previous work on the Basque people of southern Europe to recount how the Basques established themselves in the whaling trade by salt-curing cod. He begins with the Vikings, who air-dried cod to provide themselves with long-lasting victuals on their long sea journeys, including the series of journeys between 9 which made them the first Europeans to visit the Americas. In the first of the book’s three parts, “A Fish Tale,” Kurlansky introduces his main line of investigation: how has a fish made to “endure” been brought almost to the brink of extinction? His answer is that the cod, an animal which “swims with its mouth open and swallows whatever will fit” has “among its predators man, an open-mouthed species even greedier than cod.” With this thesis in mind, Kurlansky proceeds to trace the long history of cod fishing, arguing that the cod fishery has been instrumental in the construction of the trans-Atlantic world.

The book is a pioneer in the genre of historical writing that finds new angles on familiar stories by tracing the history of a particular commodity. A bestseller upon publication, Cod has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (1997), a work of non-fiction by reporter and author Mark Kurlansky, traces the history of man’s exploitation of the North Atlantic cod as a resource, in order to shed light on our changing relationship with the natural world at large.

Cod by mark kurlansky