This study offers a chronological history of seal fishing in the Falkland Islands and Dependencies from the eighteenth century to the early twenty-first. It concerns the fluctuating seal population due to sealing; the Atlantic and global demand for seal fur and oil; the competition between American, British, and Canadian sealers over the territory’s seal stocks; and the attempts by various ruling governments to prioritise domestic sealing, maintain sufficient seal stocks, and continue to make profit. It is comprised of nine chapters, the first and last chapters of which serve as introduction and conclusion. The study also includes eight appendices presenting tabled statistics, and a select bibliography. The appendices concern seal skin imports into London; vessel details at Puerto Soledad; the value and amount of seal products exported from the Falklands; Canadian sealing vessels entering Port Stanley; seal catch and oil yield in South Georgia; South Georgian seal catch summaries; South Georgian commercial catches by sealing division; and marine mammal products landed in the Newfoundland fisheries region.

In The Greening of Antarctica Alessandro Antonello investigates the development of an international regime of environmental protection and management between the signing of the Antarctic Treaty in 1959 and the signing of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources in 1980. In those two decades, the Antarctic Treaty parties and an international community of scientists reimagined what many considered a cold, sterile, and abiotic wilderness as a fragile and extensive regional ecosystem. Antonello investigates this change by analyzing the negotiations and developments surrounding four environmental agreements: the Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora in 1964; the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals in 1972; a voluntary restraint resolution on Antarctic mining in 1977; and the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources in 1980. Though distant from world populations, Antarctica has long been a site of inter-state contest for geopolitical power and standing. This book reveals how a range of contests, geopolitical, epistemic and imaginative, created the environmental protection regime of the Antarctic Treaty System, and discusses the tension between states' individual searches for power and the collective desire for stability in the region. In this international and diplomatic context, the actors were not only trying to keep relations between themselves orderly, but they were also using treaties to order the human relationship with the environment. Drawing on a wide range of international archives, many newly-opened, The Greening of Antarctica offers the first detailed narrative of a crucial period in Antarctic history and reveals the contours of global environmental thought and diplomacy in the transformative Age of Ecology.