In 1953, fishing yields in Peru were 28th highest in the world. Less than ten years later Peru had vaulted to number one. The registered capacity of the country's fishing fleet increased 39-fold, and the processing capacity of its fishmeal factories grew by a factor of 19. The subsequent collapse of Peruvian fishery in the early 1970s was almost equally as vertiginous.
Kristin Wintersteen's The Fishmeal Revolution sets the fantastic story of the rise, fall, and partial rise again of Peru's fishery in a larger, ecological context that considers the industrialization of fishing not in one individual state or of a single species of fish but across the Humboldt Current ecosystem as a whole (including both Chile and Peru). The book is, in the author's words, a “translocal” history. In the best traditions of environmental history, The Fishmeal Revolution describes the effects of climatological oscillations on how humans have lived...
