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details. Two points stood out. First, the species of tuna is skipjack rather than yellowfin or

bigeye, which at the time Coles stated are ‘two popular species that are in many cases

currently overfished or in danger of overfishing’ (Coles 2012, para 2). Secondly, the fish

comes from traditional fishermen in the Maldives who catch tuna using a traditional pole and

line method. These two features would become central to the development of a wide-ranging

movement towards sustainable tinned tuna. A sustainability economy was in the making,

forming part of a sustainability assemblage.

“Imploding” the History of a Tin

In order to understand the emergence of sustainable tinned tuna we need to consider the

history of tuna fishing and preservation, and what has led to this moment in history of an

ocean sustainability crisis. Prompted by Joseph Dumit (2011, pp. 9-11) over the next four

sections I respond to the following questions: How does the Coles tin connect us to world

histories? How is the world constituted in it, and it constituted in the world? What are the

histories of its production, trade and regulation? What kinds of technologies and machines

enabled its production? What materials are involved, and where, how and by whom have

these been sourced? How has it travelled historically? What ways of life are involved? And

how is its story told?

There is a lot of history in a tin of tuna. But while the invention of the tin itself

revolutionised food consumption in the 1800s (as I detail in the next section), the story of

rd
preserved tuna dates back to at least the 3 century BC in the Mediterranean. In the Grotto

del Uzzo near Favignana, the first traces of tuna consumption are present in drawings of tuna

and skeletal remains dating to the Neolithic period (Sarà 1998). The annual migration of the

Atlantic bluefin from the Atlantic Ocean to the warm and highly saline waters of the

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