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Nantes France where there had been a long history of preserving sardines in vinegar, butter
and olive oil (Toussaint-Samat 2006, p. 743). Others in the area followed suit and soon there
was a thriving sardine canning industry in Brittany. Before the schools of sardines abandoned
the coast of Brittany in the 1880s due to cold temperatures (Toussaint-Samat 2006, p. 745),
there were about thirty small canneries and the region was producing around fifty million tins
of sardines for worldwide export (Shephard 2006, p. 242).
Some 41 years after the tin was invented, an impressive array of preserved tinned
food featured at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Prince Albert, who had dreamt up
the project, had an ambition to create a great show of ‘products, manufacturers, natural
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products and arts of all nations’ (in Shephard 2006, p. 249) . It is unclear whether tinned
tuna was one of those items. This seems unlikely since tuna was not canned en mass until the
sardine shortages of the early 1900s. What is clear is that tinned food was a significant part of
the exhibition and symbolised the culmination of a period of intense British global
exploration, colonisation and industrial invention.
Tonno in Scatola: from Barrels to Tins in Southern Italy
From this point in time there are two stories of tinned tuna. One story follows the
introduction of canning to the repertoire of bluefin preservation in the Mediterranean. The
other story, which I explore in the next section, starts in the early 1900s when sardine
shortages saw the emergence of a global tinned tuna commodity. This tinned tuna has come
to be the convenient supermarket product that we know today, using smaller tuna species
rather than bluefin.
During the previous two hundred years before the invention of canning, the tonnare
underwent significant socio-technical and economic changes as a result of the introduction of
a capitalist system (replacing a feudal system) and the spread of industrialisation (Longo &
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