The Craft of Expansive Navigation
The Craft of Expansive Navigation
A discussion of how the motorization of trawling scaled up the operation of the Mazara fleet. The chapter focuses on the political economics of the fleet’s operation, the spatial expansion it shaped, and the labor relations it engendered at sea and ashore. I argue that this spatial dimension of the labor process distinguished motorized trawling from other contemporary kinds of fishing and seafaring. I then show how the expansive spatial dimension of this labor process charged the fleet’s operation with region-forming potential, and how it shaped onboard routine and the stratified division of labor between the owner, the captain, the mechanics, and the deckhands. Yet class-relations were only one of three main alternative frames for social action. This chapter introduces onboard life and work through the quotidian struggle over this framing: is the boat a relationship of production, a web of patronage, or a family? The next two chapters add the layered responses of “patronage” and “family.”
Keywords: labor process, industrial development, political economy, transgressive navigation, maritime history, fishing, seabed trawling
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