Scotland's Herring Fisheries and the Prosperity of the Nation, c.1660–1760

The 'piscatorial optimists' were a small, but vocal and occasionally influ ential voice in debates about economic development and prospects in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Scotland.1 They repeatedly portrayed the fisheries of which the herring fisheries were by some considerable margin the most important in terms of exports by value as, potentially, the source of a prosperous, secure future for the nation.2 'The Fishing of this natione', the Convention of Royal Burghs declared in 1690, 'is undenyably the farr greatest manufactorie thereof.'3 Almost a century later, in 1778, David Loch described the fisheries as 'on the whole an inexhaustible source of riches to the whole nation'.4 The purpose of this article is, first, to trace the episodic efforts to promote the Scottish herring fisheries in the century or so which followed the Restoration of 1660. The establishment of the British