The long-distance fishing operations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were among the first examples, and very likely the largest examples, of what Marx called manufacture—mass production, without machinery, of commodities that were sold for profit—“a specifically capitalist form of the process of social production."

In the Fishing Revolution, capital in pursuit of profit organized human labor to turn living creatures into an immense accumulation of commodities. ... That increased production supported a qualitative increase in the volume of fish consumed in Europe—and began the long-term depletion of ocean life that in our time has pushed cod and many other ocean species to the brink of extinction.