Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

Oyster Wars and the Public Trust: Property, Law, and Ecology in New Jersey History. By Bonnie J. McCay. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. xxii, 246 pp. $45.00, isbn 0-8165-1804-1.)

This book is a difficult slog through the muck of tidewater fisheries litigation in New Jersey from the colonial period to the present. But the effort is worthwhile. Bonnie J. McCay unfolds the historical and anthropological development of fishery law and shows how precedents created in that area were used by capitalists in the industrial development of New Jersey. (Ironically, the oyster business, which built many of these precedents, still remains a mostly precapitalist activity in the mid-Atlantic region.) . . .

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