Using the extensive papers of the firm Charles Robin and Company of Jersey and Paspebiac, and the records of the Jersey mercantile establishment, Rosemary Ommer presents a detailed case study of commodity trade, uncovering the development, function, and strengths and weaknesses of all aspects of the fishery. Her analysis clearly reveals a functional three-point trading system: production in Gaspé, management in Jersey, and markets in the Mediterranean, the West Indies, and Brazil.

Employing a new set of methodologies developed for this study, Ommer is able to escape the myopic perspective of works which assume that staple-based development comprises only "good" and "bad" staples that inevitably lead to development and underdevelopment respectively. She has instead produced a rich and complex analysis which broadens our understanding of colonial staple development and commodity trade and introduces new insights on regional development.

Rosemary Ommer has been Professor of History at Memorial University of Newfoundland and is the former Research Director of Memorial's Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER). She was the Principal Investigator of the Tricounsil-funded Ecoresearch Project, "Sustainability in a Cold-Ocean Coastal Environment," investigating the sustainability of communities of fish and fishers in Newfoundland in the wake of the collapse of the groundfish stocks off Canada's east coast. She is the Director of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, University of Calgary. She is also co-editor (with Dianne Newell) of Fishing Places, Fishing People: Issues in Canadian Small-Scale Fisheries (1999) and project director of "Coasts Under Stress."

Rosemary E. Ommer's profile page

"There has been, until recently, a lamentable ignorance among historians of the British North American fisheries. [This study], erected on a firm basis of documentary sources, [is] an entirely original contribution." Julian Gwyn, Department of History, University of Ottawa.
"Ommer does not write 'thick history' about the Gaspé fishery, but underscores, rather, the way in which some key Jersey merchants used the cod fishery to enhance their economic status. This analysis of the symbiotic relationship of Jersey and the Gaspé makes a significant contribution to Staple Literature. George Rawlyk, Department of History, Queen's University.