Gordon Jackson originally published The British Whaling Trade in 1978 to overwhelmingly positive reviews. The International Maritime Economic History Association has re-released this seminal work with a new introduction and a revised and expanded bibliography. Throughout The British Whaling Trade Jackson certainly does not shirk on the technological or statistical detail in describing the evolution and eventual demise of the British whaling industry over its more than 350 year lifecycle—from the early seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century—but it is the narrative fluidity of the work that really recommends it. To put it bluntly, Jackson has a great story to tell, and he does it justice.

The story of Britain's whaling industry, as Jackson tells it, is so compelling because it is founded on a set of themes that run through each section and chapter in the book. These themes pass in and out of the text, tying together episodes that are often widely dispersed in time and space into a coherent whole.

Technological change is one of the themes that Jackson alludes to, implicitly or explicitly, in nearly every chapter. At times the technological transformation of interest is described in lucid and exacting detail—for example, when the discovery of whale oil's chemical properties generated new demand from soap and margarine producers (chapter 11). At other times Jackson presents technological changes in their larger social and economic context—for example, the increasing demand for whale oil as an industrial lubricant, the introduction of mineral oils as a viable substitute, or the advances in vegetable oil processing techniques (chapters 3, 6, and 14, respectively). The widespread technological discontinuity associated with the application of steam power to locomotion, winches, and harpoon guns, in conjunction with advances in the processing of the biomass (extracting oil from the meat and bones), and the use of explosives in the hunt is also well documented (chapter 9). These changes in technique and technology are portrayed as a force driving transitions in the industry from one ocean and stock of whales to the next, from one industry leader to the next, and from one output market to the next.

A second major theme in the book is one that is particularly relevant in our contemporary bio-economic environment. Jackson presents a convincing, although almost exclusively qualitative, picture of the biological devastation that was left behind as the whaling fleets moved from one stock to the next in their search for cheap and profitable sources of biomass. The structure of the book is built around this migration of hunting effort from Spitzbergen to the east coast of Greenland, into Davis Strait, the north Atlantic, the south Atlantic, around the coast of Australia and throughout the south Pacific, then to Antarctica, South Africa, and finally the north Pacific (p. 226). Jackson does not discuss any biological modeling techniques, nor does he present any evidence that may be derived from these modeling techniques. This is hardly a meaningful criticism, as Jackson is trained as a historian, not a marine biologist, and when the book was first published most of the modern approaches to understanding marine resource depletion were in their infancy. Of course the re-release of the book may have been an ideal opportunity to briefly review some of the more recent quantitative evidence on long-run marine mammal depletion, if only because much of this evidence supports Jackson's qualitative interpretation of the whalers' own experiences.

The final theme that Jackson weaves through the book is the futility of government efforts to promote, divert, or restrain British hunting effort. The provision of bounties coincides with an expansion in the number of British vessels participating in the hunt in the mid-eighteenth century, but Jackson argues (pp. 47–51) that it was increased demand due to industrialization and the need for cheap lubricants that rewarded this increased effort, not government subsidization. When the industry finally moved into the waters around Antarctica the British Colonial Office made numerous attempts to discriminate amongst competing foreign and domestic whaling interests, but Jackson suggests (pp. 155–58) that the feasibility of pelagic whaling and the presence of land-based processing stations outside of the Colonial Office's control made these efforts costly to British firms, but ultimately pointless. By the early twentieth century the depletion of global whale stocks was so prevalent that national and international regulatory bodies tried, unsuccessfully, to limit participants, restrict hunting seasons, and impose catch quotas (pp. 193–98, and 216–18). Jackson describes in wonderful detail the repeated stock collapses and persistent financial losses that resulted from these regulatory failures.

The fact that The British Whaling Trade has unquestionably been the seminal work on British whaling since 1978 suggests that in reviewing the recent re-release the reviewer's job may be safely confined to comments on its continued relevance for the study of not just whaling, but the commercial exploitation of renewable resource stocks in general. In his new introduction Jackson acknowledges that much has been written on whales and whaling between 1978 and 2005. He correctly states that most of this work has, at least implicitly, supported his initial interpretation of the available evidence (p. xi). However, new approaches to historical investigation, and quantitative biological modeling have drastically expanded the tools available to researchers and the questions that may be posed. Doing more to draw parallels between the findings of contemporary archeological research, genetic modeling and econometric analysis, and the more qualitative conclusions proposed in The British Whaling Trade could have gone far to convincing the reader that the new questions being asked, and the new conclusions being reached, should be considered complementary to Jackson's findings, rather than in conflict with them. The British Whaling Trade has stood the test of time not only because it is an illustration of fine historical research, but also because Jackson has successfully woven this research into a compelling and entertaining narrative.