ABSTRACT
Fisheries management has come prominently into focus in the second half of the twentieth century, and must be seen essentially as a response to pressure on resources at the international and indeed at the global level. Of course elements of fisheries management are much older, and indeed the beginnings are lost in history. It can be assumed that the earliest measures of fisheries management occurred at the local level, and are likely in the first place to have been a reaction to pressure on resources in the context of settlements such as subsistence villages, in which systems of allocation of resources and definition of access to them are traditional and have operated from very early into modern times. Research into the preEuropean cultures of California, in which farming was unknown, show that some groups of native Indians depended heavily on fishing; yet they had developed strategies of resource management in which custom, reinforced by ritual rules, often guaranteed the availability of fish in the long term by preventing over-exploitation (McEvoy 1986:2-40). In addition, at a higher level of organisation, various cities, countries and other authorities have imposed measures of management and control in fisheries throughout history, although these have been of limited scope compared with many of the modern systems of management.
