ABSTRACT
in the nineteenth century, fishing, an old and important activity in Scotland, grew sufficiently to keep its place within a more diversified and industrialised economy. The fishermen who most successfully adapted to changing conditions were those of the east coast. Each crew continued to engage in several different forms of fishing—for example, for cod and for haddock, the traditional main products—but it was a fishing which had previously existed on the east coast only in restricted and uncertain scale that was to dominate development: that for herring. Decade by decade, the indicators of activity—numbers of boats, value of capital, size of landings—rose. The herring came to dominate the life of the fisherman; and the whole system of activity which was set in motion every year for a few summer weeks came to rank as one of the main industries of the country. By the eighteen-seventies, on the east coast alone, some 30,000 fishermen and about the same number of shore workers would be thus employed. Herring, in addition, were caught on other coasts and at other seasons, often by the same men. But it was the summer fishing which pulled in the greatest number of men and boats and which, for most fishermen, overshadowed everything else in the fishing year. It is to this fishing, as pursued by east-coast fishermen, that the following discussion relates. In organisation it was largely separate from the other systems of equipment, fishing and marketing in which the same men were often engaged, and in this sense may be regarded as a separate industry.
