Jack Bouchard

Jack Bouchard, Terra Nova: Food, Water, and Work in an Early Atlantic World. Yale University Press, 2025.

Jack Bouchard’s Terra Nova is both an impressive and significant intervention in historiography of the Atlantic world which further develops the subfield of ocean environmental history, histories of labour and food, and histories of the commons. Used by fish workers to describe the “waters and coasts of the northwest Atlantic where they actively caught fish, a vast and malleable space that changed from year to year and season to season”, sixteenth-century Terra Nova was both a multi-species and a multi-ethnic space. Drawing parallels between Beothuk, Innu, and Mi’kmaq seasonal migrations and foodways with the migratory, seasonal work of European fishers, the book is at its base, a material environmental history that is attentive to the energy patterns, scales, and rhythms of coastal ecology and the nonhuman world. One of Bouchard’s most striking contentions is that “fishwork,” a non-capitalist form of production that used old methods and simple techniques to process marine life into a commodity for instant consumption, contributed to emergent capitalism.

Bouchard engages with a remarkable diversity of sources – historical and historiographical – in multiple languages and forms (archaeological, climatological, artistic, cartographic). The result is a richly layered and engagingly written environmental history of the early modern world—a rarity in the field thus far—that centers Terra Nova as a highly significant space in the global environmental history of the sixteenth century. Bouchard’s writing and research enrich the reader and field impressively.