Many readers of The Journal of Economic History will be familiar with the name Gifford Pinchot, a longtime U.S. political figure, perhaps best remembered as the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, and a leader of the country's early conservationist efforts. It was Pinchot who established the goal that natural resource management should “provide the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.” In Whales and Nations, Kurkpatrick Dorsey reviews the diplomatic history of international regulation of whaling. If judged rigorously against Pinchot's standard, the regulation of whaling must be considered a failure; however, relative to the management of the rest of the world's ocean fisheries, whaling might reasonably be considered a success story. Either way, Dorsey provides a detailed narrative account of that effort.

Contrary to the image of cetacean slaughter left by Moby Dick and other accounts of whaling in the age of sail, the primitive technologies of that era did not seriously threaten the whales' survival, and the subsequent use of petroleum as a whale oil substitute meant that they never would. It took the combination of the hydrogenation process (whales are, after all, just vast larders of fat) and a set of technological innovations (e.g., steam-driven vessels) culminating in the factory ship to drive some whale stock towards extinction. To give readers a feel for the scale of the resulting slaughter, according to Dorsey's data, in the 1904/05 whaling season only 15 blue and humpback whales were processed. On the eve of World War II, more than 35,000 were being taken annually.

Catches of that magnitude were considered unsustainable and thus violated Pinchot's standard for wise stewardship. Few observers at the time disagreed. The problem was reconciling conservation's constraints with the often mutually exclusive claims of the industry's current insiders (most prominently including labor, capital, and consumers) and the interests of future generations. Recognizing as much, Dorsey adopts the whaling industry's definition of “rationality,” which, as it turns out, was the opposite “irrationality,” defined by industry participants as the destruction of whale stocks rather than their cautious use (p. 11). Of course any practical efforts to “rationalize” the industry's practices had to confront the common resource problem, and here is where the diplomatists come in.

Dorsey does an excellent job of covering the history of the industry's international regulation, though cliometricians might like to see him do a bit more with the price and quantity data. Efforts at international control began as early as 1911, even before the mass butchery of the blues and humpbacks was underway, but the onset of war in 1914 ended those efforts. Postwar economic hardship and the demand for fats, especially in Europe, kept up the pressure on whale stocks, which in turn kept pressure on the move towards conservation. Readers who think of the United States as the über capitalist regime might be surprised to learn that Americans led the interwar attempts at securing a conservation pact; whereas those supposedly more eco-friendly Brits and Norwegians were processing whales as fast as they could. That the U.S. whaling industry was practically nonexistent by then probably had something to do with the position taken by the country's leaders.

The first international convention of any note arrived in 1931, but, as readers might guess, to say enforcement was lacking would be an understatement. Indeed, the industry expanded rapidly only to collapse again during World War II. After the war, the United States again led the conservation movement, and in 1946 the International Whaling Commission (IWC) was established. While the major players (including industry insiders and the nation states that wanted to protect their capitalists, workers, and markets) were willing to concede the need to conserve, it was generally agreed that more information on the biology of whales was required to determine the “maximum permanent yield,” which was considered the optimal rate of exploitation. It became the magic figure around which subsequent conservation would revolve.

Dorsey documents in detail the ensuing foot-dragging related to defining and enforcing agreements related to this controversial concept. To cite just one example of how the entire international apparatus could be damaged by a single player, the Soviet Union was taking roughly 10,000 whales a year during the immediate postwar decades (p. 157). If they weren't going to play along, the logic went, why should we? Still, for conservationists, the volume ends on an upbeat note with the final chapter entitled, “The End of Commercial Whaling.” Moreover, recently, in an otherwise dismal review of the world's fisheries, The Economist magazine praised the IWC as one of the few effective organizations involved in the conservation effort.

Although Dorsey writes well, and although the book is readable in a way that many academic tomes are not, too often it seems as if he is summarizing the minutes of various diplomatic proceedings rather than explaining to the reader the importance of those proceedings for his broader narrative. Also, readers of The Journal of Economic History should not expect to find a cliometric treatment of whaling. These quibbles aside, if you want an excellent narrative account of the diplomacy that saved the whales, there is no question: this is the volume for you.