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

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.