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The expansion of the industry was aided by the grand maritime inventions of the

1950s –larger and technologically advanced fleets and on board storage. This enabled long

distant travel and duration at sea, and liberated the need for fleets and canneries to be in close

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proximity . As a result canneries moved to countries with cheaper labour, and fleets went
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further to sea into underutilised marine ecosystems . Other than technology, these patterns

were driven by capitalist imperatives and resource use, along with the enduring notion that

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the seas are inexhaustible . This dynamic pattern can be understood through Jason Moore’s

notion of the “commodity frontier”. Liam Campling suggests that the model of the

commodity frontier helps us to think through the dialectic relationship between humans and

nature and fluctuations in the industry (2012, p. 255). Commodity frontier, he argues, is a

concept that reinterprets capitalism within an ecological framework that reproduces itself

through new commodity frontiers (Campling 2012, p. 256). Through the case study of

Spanish and French tuna fisheries from the 1860s through to the 1980s, Campling (2012)

demonstrates the concept’s relevancy to the tuna fishing industry and its globalising process.

Capitalist firms move into new commodity frontiers where their ability to accumulate is

higher (Campling 2012, p. 256). The result is a high ecological surplus by capital until the

frontier has declined in productivity (Campling 2012, p. 256). ‘Once labouring bodies,

mineral resources and ecosystems in any single region’ (Moore 2010, p. 189) become

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exhausted and less profitable, entirely new frontiers are sought (Campling 2012, p. 256) .
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During the 20 century the wider fishing industry, including bluefin and canning tuna,

certainly matched Campling/Moore’s pattern of resource exhaustion and global expansion

that led to the exploitation of fishing grounds and species.

Global Expansion of a Sardinian Tonnara

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Not only did the tinned tuna industry expand globally during the 20 century, the tonnara of

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